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Andy Crellin Technical Services Manager Leonard Cheshire Disability Telephone: 01904 479200 E-mail: [email protected] From: James Rankin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 09 March 2009 10:17 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Using System Center for Management of about 700 Windows File Servers Your thoughts? We have a completely virtual Windows infrastructure running on ESX and use SCOM 2007 for all of our monitoring purposes. We don't do any monitoring of the VMWare kit using SCOM, but there is a management pack available (from Nworks) SCOM does an excellent job of letting us drop the number of consoles we were monitoring. Previously we had Dell IT Assistant, Citrix console, Mutiny network monitor and a whole host of other consoles to look at. With SCOM and all the relevant management packs all of the alerts are fired to a single console, so all we need to monitor is the SCOM console and the VI client. As I am just one guy supporting and monitoring sixty servers as well as designing new infrastructure, I find this invaluable - I just look up and see if a server is low on disk space, reporting predictive hardware failure, or simply exceeding a performance threshhold. I find that the default settings for many of the MS management packs give you utter overkill on your problems, but I find that I'd rather know everything that's going on than nothing. I have ironed out lots of superficial problems that otherwise I would never have known about from these messages. For instance, the OCS management pack told me that some of my telephone numbers in AD were in the incorrect format. You can easily override or disable monitors if the information is extraneous. One thing that does annoy me is that you can't seem to stop monitoring for a scheduled time period, but that's a minor concern. The worst part I find about SCOM is tuning it to provide a good quality of alerts to other operators. Give them too much, and they start to ignore them. Give them too little, and problems slip by. I am quite happy to sift through heaps of alerts and pick out the vital ones, but others don't have the patience. However, it is great for a single console for management of your windows infrastructure. I broke the database on it recently and was lost without the visibility it gives me. If a service stops, you get an alert telling you it has failed and a link to restart it. The days of writing scripts to monitor all sorts of server health events are long gone, and you certainly don't have to jump from system to system trawling event logs. It is also quite straightforward to set up your own management packs. I quickly and easily designed a little bit of monitoring to tell me when my WebSense licenses are going to run out, and it auto-starts a script to reset the WebSense services which saves me from having to take any action when it occurs. The bigger the infrastructure and the bigger your support staff, however, means more of a headache with setting it up and updating it. I find it an absolutely invaluable tool, but YMMV I am currently trying to get SCCM working as well, but the arrival of VDI means that this has been put on the backburner for a while. Cheers, 2009/3/6 Ziots, Edward <[email protected]> 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] Phone:401-639-3505 ________________________________ Internet communications are not secure and therefore Leonard Cheshire Disability does not accept any liability for the content of this message. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Leonard Cheshire Disability. If you have received this transmission in error, please contact the sender and delete it immediately. Leonard Cheshire Disability is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England no: 552847, and a registered charity no: 218186 (England & Wales) and no: SC005117 (Scotland) VAT no: 899 3223 75. Registered office: 66 South Lambeth Road, London, SW8 1RL. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
