Considerations for a Clean Installation of System Center 2012 – Operations Manager
Updated: May 13, 2016
Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager
The Deployment Guide for System Center 2012 - Operations Manager covers the full details of installing Operations Manager, in two installation scenarios:
Single-Server Deployment of Operations Manager - for evaluation, testing, and management pack development, usually in nonproduction or preproduction environments
Distributed Deployment of Operations Manager - forms the foundation of 99 percent of Operations Manager deployments. It allows for the distribution of features and services across multiple servers to allow for scalability. It can include all Operations Manager server roles and supports the monitoring of devices across trust boundaries through the use of the gateway server
For the purposes of design and planning this topic will focus on design considerations for a distributed deployment making use of multiple management servers and the use of resource pools.
If you have not reviewed Getting Started with System Center 2012 - Operations Manager or System Requirements for System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, you may want to before continuing. These documents contain key concepts and important configuration details.
Note
Unified Installer is a utility designed to perform new, clean installations of System Center 2012 for testing and evaluation purposes only. If you want to upgrade from an existing System Center installation or choose any set up options such as high availability or multi-server component installs, we recommend you refer instead to the procedures detailed in the deployment guides for each individual System Center 2012 component.
Common Installations
Use the Operations Guide for Operations Manager for System Center 2012 to determine hardware requirements for each Operations Manager server feature. If you want to install more than one feature on the same computer, use the higher of the recommended hardware requirements for any of the combined features.
The sizing helper is a downloadable tool in spreadsheet format that contains tabs listing general information on supported configurations, as well as sizing examples based on number of agents and number of network devices monitored, information on gateway servers, and more.
For example, a scenario calling for 500 agents monitoring 50 network devices calls for a recommendation of:
(1) One management server managing up to 500 agents handling the entire workload, plus (1) one additional management server for HA / failover, managing up to five SDK connections
(2) Two management servers in a single resource pool monitoring the 50 network devices
(2) Two servers: An Operations Database Server, and an Operations Data Warehouse Server (with an SRS and Web Console Server)
Not included in this scenario is the possible need for a gateway server. They are supported for use in managing network devices, but the gateway server must be in its own resource pool, and not in the same pool as the devices.
Resource Pools
A resource pool is a collection of management servers or gateway servers used to distribute work amongst themselves and to take over work from a failed member.
Due to the introduction of resource pools it is recommended that all management servers be connected by a low latency network. This means that if you are currently using management servers in multiple datacenters or sites we recommend you move all management servers to a single data center and use gateway servers at the other sites.
You should always have two management servers in ANY environment. A second management server allows for failover and easy restore. All management servers are members of the All Management Servers Resource pool, which balances the monitoring load of your management group as new management servers are added, and provides automatic failover for monitoring. See Distributed Deployment of Operations Manager for complete details.
Make sure the SDK Service is running on all management servers and that any SDK client (console, web console, connector, PowerShell) can connect to it. In System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, setup sets this service to automatically start on every management server during installation. Any SDK client can connect to any management server.