Dustin's Tech Notes

A few years ago Microsoft product groups began releasing Best Practice Analyzers  or BPAs. A BPA will run a diagnostic health check against the particular product for which it was developed. The BPA will then return information related to application misconfigurations, security issues, and possible performance problems. BPAs are a great way to verify a newly installed product is properly configured. A BPA can also be used to review existing environments for accidentally configuration changes that may impact the reliability or performance of the server product.

The Office Communications Server 2007 BPA allows you to scan your OCS deployment and will report any known issues and how to resolve them. Let’s take a look at the OCS BPA.

 

1. The OCS BPA can be downloaded from the Microsoft download center at http://download.microsoft.com. Download and install the OCS BPA by opening the RTCBPA.msi.

 

 

2. Click Next to start the install and complete the BPA install.

 

3. After installing the OCS BPA click Start –> All Programs –> Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 –> Best Practices Analyzer –> Best Practices Analyzer.

 

4. Click the link to Check for updates now. This will make sure the BPA has the latest rules when performing checks.

 

5. After the update completes click the link to Select options for a new scan.

 

6. Enter an Active Directory Domain Controller in the Active Directory Server text box. (This may autodiscover a DC for you). Then click the Connect to the Active Directory server link.

 

7. Select the options you want to choose for the scan. In most cases you will probably want to select all available options. If necessary you can change the network speed. Click the Start scanning link.

 

8. The BPA scan your deployment. This may take several minutes depending on the number of servers and network speed.

 

9. The scan will complete. Make sure all selected options have the green completed check mark beside them. Then click the View a report of this Best Practices scan link.

 

10. You can now review all issues found by the BPA. For example missing hotfixes and critical updates. The BPA will even provide information about where to obtain the update.

 

 

11. We can even see in this example we need to make some configuration changes such as moving the database log files to different disk drives.

 

12. Finally we can choose to export the BPA report to a flat file. This is useful to store with your configuration documentation. You could also give this file to an OCS admin to resolve outstanding issues. The report and can be exported to XML, CSV, and HTML formats.

 

I highly recommend running the OCS BPA against your deployment on a regular basis. It’s just added insurance to make sure your environment is “up to snuff”.