System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta is now available to download.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/dd239186.aspx

For those of you at TechEd this year you will have heard the announcement that instead of an SP2 next year there will be an R2 release because of basically the number of enhancements and features does not warrant just a rollup service pack.

First question is what does R2 mean in terms of licensing? i.e. can I upgrade from OpsMgr SP1 to R2. The answer is technically yes but it is my understanding that this will not be free upgrade unless, of course, you have purchased SA (Software Assurance) as an R2 release is viewed as a new version of the product.

So hopefully in the next couple of weeks I am going to try and set aside some time to do a test install and post back my findings but highlights of this release will be:

Cross Platform Monitoring

Extends Operations Manager to perform detailed monitoring of non-Microsoft operating systems, and workloads running on those systems.

• Integrated experience for discovery of systems to be monitored; whether Windows, Unix, Linux or other.
• Addition of Unix/Linux servers into the device management node of the administration pane.

Service Level Tracking

• Presents a detailed report on performance and availability metrics of IT service levels for all monitored IT services.
• Allows granular definition of how an IT service will be monitored; allowing definition of service level objectives that can be targeted against different objects that are to be monitored.
• Delivers the capability to report and surface information through dashboards, such as Microsoft SharePoint.

New Monitoring Templates

Monitoring templates aid in the creation of monitoring capabilities by providing a predefined set of monitors.

• New process monitoring template, enabling you to monitor for a minimum number of processes running on a system, set a threshold to identify when the number of processes exceeds a defined number, and define policy that can terminate an undesired process should it be identified on a monitored system.
• Enhanced OLEDB template, allowing operators to identify the database and set thresholds for connection, query and fetch times, as well as run custom queries against a database.
• Improved Windows Service template, enabling wildcard entry for selection of multiple, similarly-named services.
• New templates for monitoring the existence of log files on Unix and Linux systems.

Enhanced Usability

• New integrated import wizard for management packs (MPs) allows you to brows the MPs available on the MP catalog, and automatically download and install those MPs that you select.
• Enhanced notification subscription wizard, simplifying the creation and maintenance of notifications. New features include allowing operators to create notifications directly from the alert view, and to more easily create targeted and condition-based notifications.
• New overrides summary view, allowing you to view all overrides across both sealed and unsealed management packs.
• New ability to view the health explorer via the web console.
• One-click maintenance mode, ensuring that all necessary and related monitors suspend their respective monitoring at the same time.

Improved Performance

• Enhanced console delivers significantly improved response times compared to earlier versions of the product.
• Improved scalability of URL monitoring, delivering monitoring of over 1000 URLs per management server.
• Adds full support to install on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

It's beginning to feel a lot like..........

.....the busiest time of the year!

Wow....time flies when you are really busy. Looks like I have been neglecting my blog! November seems to have just flown by! In the last month I have been deploying Operations Manager 2007 on Windows 2008 and also deploying VMM to work in conjunction with it. So far things are going ok but I have hit into issues with the DHCP and DNS management packs. Basically it seems that the monitoring/discovery scripts keep launching on the agent server causing memory to be eaten by the cscript process like it's going out of fashion! Any how Microsoft are aware of these issues and last week a new DHCP pack was released and this seems to have done the trick....just the DNS one now please Microsoft.

Yesterday Dilgenter had their annual Symposium event at the Science Museum In London. I did a keynote presentation in the afternoon on System Center Roadmap and overall it was a real success with over 40 people attending. I was really encouraged to see the interest in the System Center family and with success of an event it hopefully means more projects which is great so I am planning to follow up initially with a series of webinars over the next couple of months on OpsMgr, VMM 2008, OpsMgr 2007 R2 and ConfigMgr....oh yeah and maybe fit some Christmas shopping in at some point!!!