SCVMM 2008 and Ops Manager

While SCVMM 2007 had good integration with Ops Manager, SCVMM 2008 has gone to the next level with our Performance and Resource Optimization feature (PRO). In a nutshell, PRO allows you to tie specific Ops Manager alerts to actionable remediation actions. For example, you might want to load balance VMs between physical hosts when specific thresholds are exceeded (transactions per second, CPU utilization, email message delivery SLA etc.). Alternatively, you might want to migrate VMs when a hardware failure is detected, like a fan failure for example. PRO is fully extensible since PRO itself is simply an extension of the existing Operations Manager management pack infrastructure. Once PRO finds an opportunity for optimization, it generates a PRO tip which comes complete with the remediation script baked in. Admins can manually approve the PRO tip for implementation or set PRO up to automatically implement tips on all or a subset of your environment.

Furthermore, we wanted to ensure that the person in front of the SCVMM console didn't have to go to the Ops Manager console every time a PRO tip is generated to provide a more seamless user experience. We wanted admins to get access to this information directly through the SCVMM UI which is what you see when you click on "PRO Tips" in SCVMM 2008 - Ops Manager generates the PRO tip and publishes it back to SCVMM. Of course, the Ops Manager UI will show the corresponding alerts as well so the information remains consistent.

In the beta release of SCVMM 2008, the initial configuration of PRO was a little bit more cumbersome than we liked so in the final release, we've simplified this by incorporating a "Configure Operations Manager" option to our setup splash screen. When you run our setup on your Ops Manager machine and select this option, SCVMM installs the our admin client and Powershell infrastructure locally, configures security and also imports the required management packs required to run PRO. You then run the Ops Manager client installation on the VMM box and voilà, you can now share information securely between the two systems and take full advantage of PRO.

 

 

You'll see tighter integration between the System Center family as a common theme in future System Center releases, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Rakesh

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Whilst preparing for the TechNet Virtualization roadshow I came across some interesting links to help

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Whilst preparing for the TechNet Virtualization roadshow I came across some interesting links to help

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Better yet, you can read all about it here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx As to whether this is an "answer" to Update Manager? Well, turns out we've been patching millions of machines with Windows Update and Configuration Manager for years now, this tool really helps bring the technologies together. As a platform company, we've been solving these types of problems for years at levels of scale nobody else in the world has to worry about. You can do the evaluation and decide for yourself but I believe you'll find that Config Manager and WSUS provide much richer levels of policy management, orchestration and enterprise level scale than Update Manager or most other configuration/patch management products for that matter.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Can you explain how the new OfflineVM servicing tool will work with SCVMM and is this Microsoft's answer to VMware Update Manager?

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack para Windows 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads