Executive Summary:
Microsoft has recently released System Center Configuration Manager 2007, part of the Microsoft System Center family of management solutions. System Center Configuration Manager identifies the causes of common configuration and deployment problems and provides ways to solve them. System Center Configuration Manager 2007 is being released almost simultaneously with Windows Server 2008 and simplifies the deployment of Server 2008.
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It’s common knowledge that IT people spend about 70
percent of their time on maintenance tasks. But just
think of all the projects you could finish and how much
you could benefit your organization’s bottom line if you
could reduce that percentage. Freeing IT from day-to-day
drudgery so that technology can become a strategic business
asset is a key motivator behind Microsoft’s efforts to
unify its systems management products and management
infrastructure. The System Center family is at the core of
these efforts. The recent release of System Center Configuration
Manager 2007 (SCCM) illustrates Microsoft’s focus
on “transforming [customers’] infrastructure into a strategic
and progressive asset for their business,” according to Brad
Anderson, general manager of Microsoft’s Management
Solutions Division.
For example, Brad said, “We know that the numberone
cause of unplanned downtime on Windows Server is
when a configuration change is made and the ramifications
[of that change] are not truly understood.” With the
model-based management approach built into SCCM,
Brad continued, “we’ll have technology in place so when
a configuration change is made, we’ll be able to detect that
the change was made and notify the administrator before
that change becomes a catastrophe.” The idea is that by
identifying the causes of common problems and providing
ways to avoid them, System Center can have “dramatic
impacts on uptime, customer satisfaction, and real value to
the customer.”
To illustrate the value of System Center’s capabilities,
Brad cited the example of a study examining Microsoft’s
customer-support calls. “In January 2007, we looked at
every call that came in about our big server workloads in
the most critical situations—when the customer is literally
down and in need of help. We looked at how many of those
calls would have been avoided, and 48 percent of all those
critical calls would have been prevented had [the customer]
been using the monitoring capabilities of Operations Manager
and the desired-configuration management capabilities
of Configuration Manager.”
Those capabilities, Brad continued, are based on “models
that instruct System Center how to verify compliance
and any deviation, or drift, from a desired state. Microsoft
and some of our partners will be releasing models, and
there will be tools for IT professionals to customize those
models and build their own. They can build a model for
almost anything: How should a server be configured? What
does a secure desktop look like? The way we envision this
is the developer—whether that’s internal or an ISV—will
release their products with a model for how the application should be configured. But then IT professionals may choose
to extend that, enhance it, change it, based on their criteria.
We also see IT professionals take an application model and
combine that with an OS model and a compliance model.
And that is what they’ll use to see if a server, for example, is
configured properly.”
Windows Server 2008
Of course, one important reason why Microsoft wants to
free up your time from maintenance is to give you time
for tasks such as deploying new versions of Microsoft
products—Windows Server 2008, for example. And Brad’s
team “has the responsibility to make sure that enterprise
accounts have a simple and efficient way to deploy Windows
Server and upgrade to Server 2008 across the enterprise.”
So it’s no coincidence that SCCM is being released
almost simultaneously with Server 2008.
Brad reported that “In our TAP [Technology Adoption
Program] deployments of SCCM, the feedback we got for
the OS deployment capabilities is that it truly does enable
everything from configuring the hardware, to making sure
the server is ready to be upgraded, to doing the deployment
or upgrade—and then after you’re done, bringing back the
applications, bringing back the configuration, joining the
domain, configuring the server so it’s ready to go. So one of
the ways people will be using SCCM is that base configuration.”
Brad admitted, “Asking our customers to upgrade from
one version of Windows to another is one of the most complex
things we ask them to do.” He added, “We’re pretty
proud of what we’ve delivered in SCCM 2007 to help our
enterprise accounts get upgraded to Server 2008.”
In summary, Brad said, “We have delivered technology
to the market that enables that connection between IT
and the developer and allows the IT organization to really
understand what’s happening on their desktops, their servers,
and the applications they run on those.”
End of Article
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