Server 2008 R2 and wmiprvse.exe crashes

Recently I was checking the health of a couple of my primary site servers and as I was going through some of the logs I noticed in the application event log there where event 1000 application errors that kept reoccurring. It seemed that every couple of days wmiprvse.exe would crash and then restart but with little noticeable effect. After some digging I came across a blog entry describing a problem with SCVMM and WMI. It referenced a wmi hotfix (KB981314) that Microsoft released that deals specifically with event 1000 wmiprvse.exe errors. I decided to install the hotfix on the two site servers experiencing the problem as they are in a staging environment. Since installing the hotfix on both servers the number of wmiprvse.exe crashes has dropped significantly. It’s only been about three weeks but things are looking good…

Config Mgr Client Health Monitoring

One of the most important things in any ConfigMgr environment is the health of your clients. If your machines aren’t reporting in properly you’re dead in the water until you get the issue resolved. Since the ConfigMgr client is such a heavy hitter on WMI problems are not uncommon. For those who can’t afford a solution such as 1E’s WakeUp (which has client health monitoring built in) using a start-up or shutdown script is an inexpensive way of monitoring ConfigMgr client health. There are many scripts published out there but one of the best that I have come across is Chris Stauffer’s SCCM SP2 Health Check Startup Script found at myITForum.com. This script also works nicely during a SMS 2003 to ConfigMgr migration to ensure that all of your machines get upgraded properly. It's easy to configure and with the help of Active Directory can be deployed within minutes.