Microsoft Opens Up Management Strategy

By Michelle Savage

April 30, 2008 —  At the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 in Las Vegas yesterday, Microsoft made several announcements that support the company’s strategy to create a cross-platform, distributed enterprise management system.

Microsoft released a series of beta offerings, called System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, that allow its existing Operations Manager 2007 technology to manage both Windows and non-Windows environments in physical and virtual environments. This release includes agent infrastructure and management packs for monitoring Linux and UNIX platforms.

The betas incorporate OpenPegasus and Microsoft’s XML-based WS-Management protocol, both of which have the ability to discover, monitor, and manage physical and virtual systems on a network. The initial agent-based extensions support HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Prior to this release, the System Center suite was limited to managing Windows servers. Microsoft used to allow third parties to build software that enabled Operations Manager to manage non-Windows environments, said Larry Orecklin, Microsoft's general manager of System Center marketing. But this is the first time that Microsoft software can do this on its own. He added that, by supporting heterogeneous environments, Microsoft software is a more viable option for managing large data centers.

To further support cross-platform network management, Microsoft also released a beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that will support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, VMware ESX Server and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. According to the company, this technology helps customers configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure on those platforms.

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), which provides tips for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation. Microsoft said that PRO helps administrators optimize their data center based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time demands of users.

According to Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, these releases are a big part of the company’s strategy to enable large and complex IT organizations. By using open-source technologies and industry standards, Microsoft will continue to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments, he said.



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