System Center Operations Manager

News from Microsoft Management Summit 2009

I’m not at MMS this year unfortunately — and not just because it’s once again being held in Las Vegas! Still, there’s plenty of news to report surrounding Microsoft’s System Center suite this week. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s been making headlines:

• Operations Manager now supports Linux and Unix

  As one analyst put it, lack of interoperability has been one of the most common criticisms of System Center. It looks like Microsoft has finally resolved this by including native Linux and Unix support to the RC for Operations Manager 2007 R2, which was released this week.

• Service Manager will arrive soon (for real this time)

  It appears the beta for the long-awaited System Center Service Manager product will be out by the fall. The big news here involves the Service Manager portal, with was removed from beta 1 but seems to be back and better than ever this time around. According to a post from Microsoft Program Manager Dan Boldo, the company has spent the last few months rebuilding the portal “from the ground up”, and the second beta will include the ability to view global anouncements, create and view service requests and reset passwords via Identity Lifecycle Manager, among other things.

New AD Integration feature could make life easier for admins

What do Microsoft Management Summit and Tech-Ed 2009 have in common? Well, about a million things, obviously. But among them is that Pete Zerger will be at both events to present sessions on the new Active Directory Integration feature for SCOM 2007.

Pete is an MVP and founder of both System Center Forum and the System Center User Group, so needless to say, he knows a thing or two about Operations Manager. Despite being in Scotland for business, Pete was kind enough to speak with me a few weeks ago about AD Integration and what it means to admins.

It’s a short interview, but definitely worth checking out for those who work in SCOM-based environments. Here is a little sample of what Pete had to say about the feature:

“What this feature does is allow us to fully automate agent deployment for Operations Manager-based environments. So part of what is baked into the Operations Manager agent is that as the agent is started up, it will actually query it’s local Active Directory domain to see if configuration information has been published for an Operations Manager management group.”

According to Pete, AD Integration is designed to not only minimize administrative effort (hooray!), but reduce TCO as well, with large enterprises standing to benefit the most.

I’ll be adding more posts on what to expect at MMS and Tech-Ed this year as we get closer to both events, but if there is anything in particular that you’d like to know about, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can dig up.