Managing Your Windows Infrastructure with Microsoft System Center

Monitoring and managing IT services consumes a large proportion of most corporate IT departments' resources, and in the last few years this workload has been increased by the need to comply with new regulatory requirements. As a result, many organizations have few resources left over to devote to the introduction of new, business-enhancing technologies and services. Microsoft's System Center, a family of IT management applications, was designed to address this problem by providing a way to capture and aggregate knowledge about business applications and the IT infrastructure to more effectively manage and control the entire corporate IT environment. Much of the knowledge and best practices for managing Windows systems and applications built in to System Center comes directly from the Microsoft developers responsible for writing the code for these applications and servers. As a result, organizations that implement System Center have the opportunity to optimize the way they manage their existing IT systems, carry out complex tasks extremely efficiently, and introduce new services according to established best practices. While some System Center tools are beginning to release betas of 2010 versions, we're going to look at the 2007 versions, which are available to the public now.

Operations Manager 2007
Operations Manager 2007 is one of the key members of the System Center family. It offers a practical way to monitor hundreds or thousands of servers, end-user machines and applications, equipping IT staff with a comprehensive, real-time view of the health of the organisation's IT systems and providing alerts whenever problems occur or intervention is necessary. Management Packs lie at the core of Operations Manger 2007. These packs contain best practice knowledge that can be used to discover, monitor, troubleshoot, report on, and resolve problems for a specific technology component. Management Packs include health models based on the Systems Definition Model (SDM) to analyze performance, availability, configuration and security inputs, to determine the overall status of particular components. Management Packs are available for Microsoft operating systems, applications, and devices, and third-party products and platforms such as SAP, Oracle and Linux.

Configuration Manager 2007
Another key component of the System Center Family is Configuration Manager 2007—an upgraded version of the product formerly known as System Management Server. Configuration Manager has been designed to enable secure and scalable deployment of operating systems and applications and detailed configuration management, and to provide comprehensive asset management of servers, desktops, and mobile devices. It can dramatically simplify system deployment, task automation, compliance management, and policy-based security management in large organizations.

Essentials
Essentials brings the breadth of knowledge of the System Center family to medium-sized organizations in a simple, unified solution. It has been designed for organizations with up to 500 PCs and limited in-house IT staff—typically a single person in charge of all IT responsibilities. Essentials is easy to install, and once running it simplifies and carries out specific tasks that medium-sized businesses frequently need to perform—including software distribution, operating system and application updating, and group policy configuration. The application includes a single, unified console from which to monitor and manage the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services, and provides alerting and help when critical issues arise.

Virtual Machine Manager
System Center is a family of products that is evolving and developing, with new modules and updates to existing modules appearing regularly to meet specific IT needs. One of the latest members of the family is Virtual Machine Manager, an application that enables centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by system administrators and qualified end users, making it easy to increase physical server utilization and provide safe application test environments using virtual Windows servers and desktops. The ability to create and manage virtual machines and move them to appropriate servers efficiently is becoming increasingly important as the benefits of virtual machine technology for cost reduction become more widely understood. Recognizing this, the entire System Center product range can be used to manage both physical and virtual servers, and the same tools—such as Configuration Manager or Operations Manager—work equally well in physical or virtual environments.

Other Management Applications
The System Center family also includes:

• Data Protection Manager, designed to optimize and speed disk-based backups and recovery, as well as centralise branch office backups
• Reporting Manager, which uses a data warehouse containing information from Operations Manager and Configuration Manager databases that administrators can query to help make informed IT management decisions
• Capacity Planner, a pre-deployment capacity, performance, and infrastructure planning tool.

Best-of-Class Management Solution
The efficient management of Windows IT infrastructure has never been more important in today's competitive business environment. Microsoft System Center offers a best of class management solution—using built-in knowledge for managing key platforms, applications, and workloads—to provide the reliability, scalability, and security necessary to manage everything from medium-sized businesses to the largest, most complex infrastructure.