System Center Guide

Last Month was quite busy around here with the holidays and such, but Microsoft kept themselves busy as well. The following management packs were released or updated in the month of December 2007:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005 Management Pack (v6.0.6247.5)

12/21/2007 - The SQL Server 2000/2005 Management Pack monitors Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 MP for SC Operations Manager 2007 (v1.0)

12/14/2007 - With the DPM Management Pack, an administrator can centrally monitor the state of data protection and recovery for multiple DPM servers and protected computers. The Management Pack also monitors key health and performance indicators on DPM servers.

SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit (v.2.0)

12/7/2007 - The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007: Windows® SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (v2.0)

12/7/2007 - This management pack is part of the Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (v2.0)

12/7/2007 - This management pack is part of the Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Clive Eastwood discusses the first Solution Accelerator to be released for System Center Operations Manager. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit includes more rules, new and improved reports and comprehensive coverage of the two management packs utilised by this toolkit.

Clive goes into more detail on his blog. More after the jump.

Read Clive Eastwood’s Blog Entry

There are some confusing elements to the new System Center licensing structure – particularly for Operations Manager. The most common question is when does a customer require the Enterprise Operations Management License (OML) instead of the Standard OML? This is a valid question since the Enterprise OML price is equal to approximately three times the cost of the Standard OML.

The “How to Buy” webpage doesn’t help to explain the matter much:

Standard OML

Monitoring, troubleshooting, audit collection, and reporting for servers, including Storage/File/Print and Networking workloads, the base operating system, system hardware, and other management agents on the system

Enterprise OML

Monitoring, troubleshooting, audit collection and reporting for any server workload or application, including the base operating system, system hardware, and other management agents on the system

However, upon reviewing the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Licensing Brief, I was able to determine from the Managed Workloads section that the Enterprise version is required for anything beyond monitoring of the following:

• System Resource Manager
• Password Change Notification
• Baseline Security Analyzer
• Reliability and Availability Services
• Print Server
• Distributed File System (DFS)
• File Replication Service (FRS)
• Network File System (NFS)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Windows SharePoint® Services
• Distributed Naming Service (DNS)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS)

Whereas the Enterprise OML also permits the following usage scenarios:

• Business Applications
• Database
• Identity Management
• Messaging
• Collaboration
• Web
• Security
• Management
• Remote Access
• Terminal Emulation
• Other

So, clearly if you want to take full advantage of Operations Manager 2007 and its ability to manage distributed applications or core infrastructure products an Enterprise OML is required.

The OpsMgr product groups has provided a blog entry of every executable/MSI associated with OpsMgr 2007. Trust me, this is worth bookmarking!

View the Article