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MOM knows best

Posted on 18 Jan 2005 at 11:31

Jon Honeyball discovers just how essential Microsoft's latest management software will be to system administrators the world over

Given the costs, even a large corporation should start with the Workgroup Edition product, if only for a trial arrangement. Learn what it can do for you, and then upgrade to a large network (or not). Even some large organisations might take the view that their file/printer servers do not need management and that this is a role best suited to the email and SQL servers. In which case, a Workgroup Edition may well be sufficient for even a very large organisation.

There is one more licensing wrinkle that you need to consider: if you run MOM Workgroup Edition and have a Virtual Server (VS) 2005 installation hosting multiple virtual servers, then each virtual server will count as one of the ten licensed installations. So a server running four VS installations consumes five licences: one for the physical server and one each for the four VS installations. This is handled differently on the full product, where the number of virtual servers running is ignored, so in that last scenario your licence count would be one and the number of virtual machines is ignored. This does not mean they are not managed -they are, once you have loaded up the VS 2005 management pack. But they do not count towards the overall licence count.

Installation
Getting MOM 2005 up and running is simple, especially if you have the Workgroup Edition, which I will focus on for the time being. Before you can start, ensure that you have access to a Microsoft SQL Server installation. This can be a full-blown SQL 2000 installation, or you could just use the simple MSDE (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine) - a free download from www.microsoft.com. The security on MSDE has recently been improved, so you can no longer get away with a username of 'SA' and a blank password. However, you will need to fiddle with the command-line setup application to add on the necessary subcommand to take a suitable conformant password.

Then you run the MOM setup, which takes about 20 minutes to complete, but no reboot is required. The next step is particularly clever: run the Administration tool and it scans the local network, looking for suitable target machines onto which it can inject its management monitoring tools inside each of the servers. Then leave it for an hour or two to do its work. When you come back you will find MOM has fully populated its management interface with each of the main services on the servers you have targeted.

On the full version, you get more flexibility. It too can self install everything for you automatically onto all target machines. Or you can take finer control of how the install process runs, by controlling what happens between the discovery and deployment phases.

As it stands, out of the box, there are management packs that handle Active Directory, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser, Exchange Server, Operations Manager itself, SQL Server, Systems Management Server, Windows Base OS, DNS Server, IIS (Internet Information Server) and Windows Server Clusters. There are other management packs under development to cover technologies such as Virtual Server. Basically speaking, every forthcoming new Microsoft technology must have a management pack ready on the day the product ships.

You might recall that I had some gripes about getting the Exchange Server management pack to work in the beta version, and I suggested that a wizard or even a wholly automated installation would be a better idea: well, it is been done and installation of this component is now a one-click affair.