Operations Management Processes - MOF & SCOM
September 8th, 2007
The IT industry has learned so far that efficient operations without consistent/adaptative processess is not possible. The knowlodge has to be extracted from peoples brain and documented in tangible artifacts. We cannot sill relying on heroes for solving every infrastructure issue.
Jason Osborne (Microsoft - Frameworks PM) has started posting about what is comming in MOF. In his last post: The Operations and Support Phase of the MOF Lifecycle he has began talking about Operations Management proceses.
Here is a little overview about how Operations Management process is being defined. For a depth understanding, not only read the previous post, but also take 5 mins to download and review the PPT Jason has attached.
Technet Event: Con Windows Server 2008 en el datacenter, todo el año es primavera!
September 8th, 2007
This September 20th on Pazeo La Plaza you can enjoy another MS MSDN & Technet Briefing. This briefing will be around Windows Longhorn Server AD and IIS 7.
My slot will be focused on IIS 7 management and a live migration from and PHP website hosted on Open Suse 10.2, together with Maximo Naccarato we will provide an in-depth look of possible migration paths.
You can register and attend by visiting the following website: http://www.microsoft.com/argentina/briefing2007/
Deliver Managed Applications under the MS platform! Develop a custom Management Pack - Prologue
September 3rd, 2007
Hi all! I am willing to write a post series about Operations Manager Management Pack development. However, it is impossible to talk about Management Packs without talking about the Microsoft Systems Management vision. This is what this post is about. Right now we walking-through the 4th year of the 10 years Microsoft DSI (Dynamic System Initiative) vision. This is how Microsoft has vision the future of datacenters and the path for IT departments to be finally aligned to business. There is so much to talk about this vision but I will focus in one of its pillars the so-called DFO (Design For Operations) practice. DFO proposes a model-based management over IT systems. DFO claims to be the answer to existing poor communications between development teams and the IT support staff, what we see today is that development teams has much more deep technical understanding of developed LOB applications than the IT Staff. Sadly IT Pros are the ones who has to operate and enforce any existing SLA over this LOB app. So, how could IT Pros troubleshoot performance or operational issues spotted on running LOB apps? How could they give end-users qualified answers about what is going wrong? DFO is the answer. Again, so much to talk about DFO. David Aiken (Microsoft Architect Evangelist) has been writing about this probably more than anyone in the world in his blog. This is a must read if you are a Management-enabled ITPro J. We mentioned “model-based” management. We talk about models because Microsoft developed a model approach for describing any IT service called Service Modeling Language (SML). And through SML is how we finally get to Operations Manager Management Packs. Microsoft has been concretely applying model-based management since the release of MOM 2005 and enhanced the platform management capabilities with the release of SCOM 2007 (System Center Operations Manager 2007). Management Packs (MP) provides ITPros what they always wanted, a consistent way for operating applications like they were experts, without really being experts. For example, nowadays I can provide high levels of availability/reliability/performance of my Exchange 2007 deployment without being an Exchange guru. This is possible simply by importing the Exchange Server Management Pack to my SCOM infrastructure. By importing Management Packs I am importing a huge knowledge-base provided by the Exchange Server development team itself! At this point you can probably begin connecting the dots. Microsoft proposal with DFO is that every development team takes into account into theirs SDLC the effort required to develop a Management Pack (no matter over which platform the app is developed). By the means of a MP a development team communicates which aspects of the instrumented app are critical and has to be fully monitored 7×24x365. SCOM provides an extensible platform for developing MPs and this is what we will be talking about during this post series. Well, this was longer than I expected when I began writing (an hour ago J) but we have went through the basis to have the big picture when talking about MPs. PS: I promise to get more technician the next post J
