Hi Ed, One of my customers has rolled out Ops Manager to around 2500 servers. At that level or higher the main problems aren't technical (though there are still plenty of technical issues to overcome). The main issues are around processes, change management and so forth.
Ops Manager, just by using the baseline MS management packs, will generate thousands of alerts in a large environment. You need to get the right processes in place to tune-out spurious alerts, and have a good workflow (e.g. ticketing system) or decent operations team, that can turn a series of alerts into an incident to be managed/sorted. Maintaining the SCOM infrastructure itself (i.e. keeping all the agents running on your servers) is a decent enough task in of itself. The real value will come from being able to build LOB application management packs that you can then give out to your support folks for each application. But again, there's a whole process around requirements gathering and development, versioning, change control etc that needs to go into this development. Cheers Ken From: Ziots, Edward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2009 8:04 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? Rod, Want to lay a little knowledge down what you are leveraging in your environment with SCCM and SCOM accordingly? I have stated what I need in mine, what in these products from your experience will deliver accordingly? I am talking real-world scenario's.. Z Edward Ziots Network Engineer Lifespan Organization MCSE,MCSA,MCP+I, ME, CCA, Security +, Network + [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Phone:401-639-3505 ________________________________ From: Rod Trent [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 3:57 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? Limited number? Not sure about that. The knowledge pool is growing steadily and has been for the last 10 years for SMS/ConfigMgr and about the last 5 years for OpsMgr. Just need to find the right place to get access to those folks. IMO, both apps work in a logical manner - i.e., how these types of systems should work. Of course, I guess it helps that I've been working with them for 12+ years. From: Brian Desmond [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 3:47 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? That's SMS/SCCM + SCOM. Expect to need a good amount of practice/specialized training to manage either of them if you haven't before - they're both very complex applications. There are a limited number of people out there who really know either of them so it's a worthwhile set of skills to develop IMO. I have not seen many customers who do either of these apps remotely "right". Thanks, Brian Desmond [email protected] c - 312.731.3132 From: Ziots, Edward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 2:26 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? Three main problems, Configuration Management ( ability to set configuration settings, jobs, etc etc and let them apply to the entire farm from one central console across 5 datacenters) Systems Performance Monitoring ( Instead of me having 6-10 Perfmon mmc's open looking at systems, I set the performance monitor baselines I want to see on the servers and when they go outside the parameters, I am alerted via central console) Eventlog Management and Reporting. ( Need to be able to parse the eventlogs and achive and store them for compliance and security efforts across the farm) Compliance measuring would be a added benefit. HTH Z Edward Ziots Network Engineer Lifespan Organization MCSE,MCSA,MCP+I, ME, CCA, Security +, Network + [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Phone:401-639-3505 ________________________________ From: Brian Desmond [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 3:14 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? Well the question I'd ask you is what problem(s) are you trying to solve with this product? Thanks, Brian Desmond [email protected] c - 312.731.3132 Active Directory, 4th Ed - http://www.briandesmond.com/ad4/ Microsoft MVP - https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Brian From: Ziots, Edward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 1:52 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? Importance: High We are having Microsoft coming in to talk with us about Systems Center for Management of our ever-growing server farm, for those using it, please feel free to give me your pro's con's and tales from the trenches on what this platform said it will do, and what it really does when the rubber hits the road. My Mix of servers are ½ physical ½ virtual, SQL (2000/2005), IIS (5&6), File and Print (2000-2008), DC's (2003), Application servers ( 3rd party) (2000/2003) TVK, I especially want to hear your thoughts on this subject, since this is your MVP realm and you tend to know the most about the features and functionality. TIA in advance, Z Edward Ziots Network Engineer Lifespan Organization MCSE,MCSA,MCP+I, ME, CCA, Security +, Network + [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Phone:401-639-3505 ________________________________ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
