Hello All :) I am using SCOM 2007 R2 (about to update CU5 soon). I have seen several GUI based maintenance mode tools available on the internet, and seen mixed reviews about them. Can someone please tell me if they are using such a tool with SCOM 2007 R2 and if it works OK for them? I saw a post that CU5 comes with a maintenance mode tool but it does not work? I would be grateful if anyone could give me their options and experiences with maintenance mode tools available. Thanks Jo

The Administration Resource Kit contains a tool for sheduling maintenance mode. You should test if the tool works with CU5, haven't been able to do that yet. Personally I like this tool very much. And here a blogpost howto configure the tool: Maintenance Mode Scheduling Tool Certifications: MCSA 2003|MCSE 2003|MCTS(5*)| MCTIP:SA

Hi JoB333, I agree with Guido that the Admin Resource Kit has a really useful tool for scheduling Maintenance Mode in SCOM and can also confirm for you both that it works fine on CU5 as well as even working nicely in SCOM 2012 too! Kevin.

Hi Jo Tool is good. Initially it had some issues like it is tested for en-us and may not work well for international languages. I am not sure if it is fixed. It also has limitations of number of machines that can be added in MM. But you can always group machines for that Jimmy Harper wrote a great blog on this http://blogs.technet.com/jimmyharper/archive/2011/07/14/maintenance-mode-scheduling-tool.aspx ~Cheers, Rohit Kochher

I had a negative experience with the Maintenance Mode scheduling tool from the Administration Resource Kit. After installing it, my tempdb grew to take all available space on my tempdb drive. I tried increasing the space available on the temp drive and it would continue to grow to the point it would take all the available space. After removing the tool, this behavior went away.

Hello Richard (and ALL) Thanks for the information re the temp DB I will have to keep an eye on this. I have installed but have several problems when it comes to 'weekly' scheduling i.e. Sunday, Monday etc when I select any day it either throw an error saying it could not convert string to datetime or the says the start time need to be 1t lease 15 minutes ahead of now, which it is. Basically the weekly schedule option seems to have lost of bugs and is completely unusable. Has anyone else had these issues? Thank all Jo