Managing your Entire World

In the previous two posts the focus was on management of Microsoft Windows based products, either in a physical or virtual configuration, by using the System Center products. However, the modern datacentre is not all Windows based servers and contains a variety of different hosts that all require management. IT Departments therefore look for tools that can simplify this heterogeneous management task.

For a number of years Microsoft’s management product, Operations Manager concentrated on just the Windows environment. With the release of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 new functionality built into the product along with partnerships with key vendors now extend its capabilities beyond just Windows based servers.

The cross-platform functionality that is built into Operations Manager 2007 R2 now supports monitoring of the following operating systems:

• HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
• Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86) and 5 (x86/x64) Server
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x64) Server (At RTM)
• Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)
• Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Solaris Zones (whole and sparse zones)

What this now means is that from the Operations Manager 2007 R2 console you are able to see the state of these servers and perform remediation on them if issues are reported.

As well as providing built-in functionality to monitor non-Windows environments, Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connectors provide a method of alert forwarding to remote systems, such as an Enterprise Management System (EMS). These connectors are two way, so even after Operations Manager 2007 R2 forwards an alert to a remote system, the alert data is synchronized throughout the lifetime of the alert. The result of this data synchronization is a robust and seamless systems management environment. Such an environment enables cross-organization support processes to take advantage of the resources and strengths of formerly independent support groups.

Currently Available Connectors

• Operations Manager 2007 Connector for the BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS)
• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connector for the HP Operations Manager (formerly HP OpenView Operations)
• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connector for the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Management Console
• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Universal Connector*

These connectors coupled with the cross-platform extensions now go some way to enabling IT Departments to monitor their entire data center from one console.

*This connector can be installed and configured for potentially any remote system that is hosted on a Windows system or on a supported UNIX system.