Operations Manager 2007 Goes Cross-Platform, Hooks Into Tivoli, OpenView

Published: April 30, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft is going heterogeneous with its flagship systems management software, System Center Operations Manager 2007, the company announced yesterday from the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 conference in Las Vegas. With the Cross Platform Extensions, Ops Manager users will be able to monitor servers running Red Hat and SUSE Linux and HP-UX and Solaris Unixes, as well as Windows Servers. The company also announced Connectors, which connects Operations Manager to other major systems management products, and another beta of Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Microsoft is famous for its intense focus on its Windows operating system. While other big system vendors, like Oracle and IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, must support a diverse array of operating systems--including Windows, Linux, Unix, OS/390, OS/400, VMS, MPE, and many more--Microsoft has been entirely free (with some exceptions) to concentrate on supporting just Windows with the bulk of its products.

While the software behemoth's focus on Windows isn't likely to change any time soon (who wants to run SQL Server, Active Directory, or Halo-3 on Linux anyway?), it's a refreshing change to see Microsoft doing more to help customers deal with the incredible diversity of platforms and technologies in today's data center. Tuesday's announcement that its System Center Operations Manager 2007 product will be able to monitor other operating systems, via the new Cross Platform Extensions pack (which is just entering beta), is a good first step to opening up to non-Windows platforms.

According to Microsoft, Cross Platform Extensions builds on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and is designed to help customers monitor and manage Windows and non-Windows applications. Microsoft says the software is based on open source technologies, including the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) standard and OpenPegasus, an open source project for a "manageability services broker," according to its Web site. Microsoft also joined the OpenPegasus project.

Microsoft says that, with the Cross Platform Extensions, it's delivering the "core foundational cross-platform support" for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems. That will leave partners free to focus on adding their "deep domain expertise" for supporting non-Windows applications with management packs.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, made the announcement during his keynote address at MMS08 yesterday. "By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware, and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness, and value for their business," he says.

Microsoft also announced a beta of System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, which will open System Center Operations Manager 2007 to HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli systems management products. Microsoft says Connectors is based on the same technology as Cross Platform Extensions, and will provide "an integrated administrative experience" and allow System Center to "interoperate and exchange . . . monitoring data" with OpenView and Tivoli.

Last but not least, Microsoft delivered another beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which will provide the graphical interface for managing virtual machines created with one of several hypervisor and virtualization products, including Microsoft's Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 products, or even VMware's ESX Server.

Microsoft says the beta delivers a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) that will help administrators to be more efficient in how they allocate physical and virtual resources. Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is being developed in parallel with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which is slated to ship in late summer.

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