What’s The Diff Between SCOM 2007 R2 Default MP & SCOM 2012 R2 Default MP?

Issue
Bumped into a SCOM 2012 R2 environment which was built from the ground up in order to migrate away from an existing SCOM 2007 R2 environment. So many unsealed MPs from the SCOM 2007 R2 environment were exported from it and imported into the SCOM 2012 R2 environment.

Among all those unsealed MPs it turned out that the Default MP of SCOM 2007 R2 slipped through and was imported into the SCOM 2012 R2 environment as well. And yes, even though the version number of that MP is lower than the default MP which was present in the SCOM 2012 R2 environment.

However, versioning is ONLY enforced when the MP is sealed. For unsealed MPs version numbers aren’t enforced. Ever…

Is it really an issue?
However, since the SCOM 2007 R2 MP contained many custom Views and so on, it was hard for me to really know the difference between these two Default MPs. So it was time to run a comparison between both Default MPs as they’re to be found on the installation media.

For SCOM 2012 R2 it’s really easy. Simply mount the iso and browse to the folder ~:\ManagementPacks and copy the file Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.DefaultUser.xml to a dedicated temp folder.

For SCOM 2007 R2 it’s a bit more work. Mount the iso and browse to the folder ~:\Server\AMD64 and open the file OMServer.cab. Copy the file F_Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.DefaultUser.xml.540EA3C0_A5E9_41EA_A585_822C09EA2650 to a dedicated folder and rename it to Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.DefaultUser.xml by removing all the ‘trimmings’.

So now we’ve got the two ORIGINAL Default MPs. One from SCOM 2007 R2 RTM and another from SCOM 2012 R2 RTM. Time to run a comparison.

Tooling required
For this you can use many different tools. Even though I am big fan of Notepad++, in this particular case XML Notepad 2007 does a better job. Simply because this really monolithic tool is aimed only at XML for MPs, so here it works great with the additional tool XmlDiff started within XML Notepad 2007. Kevin Holman has written a posting about how to use this tool just for this, so no need for me to repeat it here.

And with the tool XmlDiff it turned out there aren’t that many differences at all.

Findings
Besides the obvious (version numbers) there are two  major differences:

The ColumnInfo entry is set to 30 in SCOM 2012 R2, compared to SCOM 2007 R2:

And the Default MP for SCOM 2012 R2 contains a filled out LanguagePack section whereas the one for the Default MP for SCOM 2007 R2 RTM is completely empty.

So as you can see, it’s not that much of a difference.

What to do?
Easy. SCOM 2007 R2 is dead (mainstream support ended on 7/8/2014!) and SCOM 2012 R2 is alive and kicking (mainstream support until 7/11/2017). So no need to drag on all that old legacy stuff into SCOM 2012 R2. Time to leave it behind.

Also THE opportunity the put all the ‘lessons learned’ into the real world. And one of those Best Practices is NOT to use the Default MP for ANYTHING, also not for Views in the Console.

So first all the Views present in the SCOM 2007 default MP were put into a dedicated MP of it’s own in SCOM 2012 R2. Afterwards the SCOM 2007 R2 Default MP was deleted and replaced by the original SCOM 2012 R2 Default MP as found on the installation media.

End of story.