• Illustration: Microsoft's Management Roadmap

The current crop of Microsoft management products will give way to two integrated products in three to five years, according to Windows Group Vice President Brian Valentine. Valentine has outlined incremental changes to the current products (Systems Management Server [SMS], Microsoft Operations Manager [MOM], and Application Center) and indicated that they will eventually merge into a pair of products: one specifically for servers and the other for clients. Although the news will help customers plan for short-term system management upgrades, Valentine said little about how Microsoft’s management technologies will evolve over the medium-term or how they will take advantage of .NET.

Valentine also made clear that Microsoft does not plan on expanding into management of non-Windows or heterogeneous systems. Other vendors, such as BMC, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, will still need to provide the tools to manage such systems.

Management Important but Not Integrated

Valentine delivered his remarks at the Microsoft Management Summit on May 3, noting that manageability is a key part of the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative. (For background, see "Trustworthy Computing a New Priority" on page 25 of the May 2002 Update.)

Over the last few years, Microsoft has beefed up its offerings in the management arena. It substantially improved SMS; created MOM from technology acquired from NetIQ; released Application Center server; built many other management technologies, including Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Microsoft Management Console, Group Policy, Windows Update, Software Update Service, and Remote Installation Service; and made Terminal Services a useful method of performing remote administration by making it a default service on Windows 2000 servers.

These product developments solve many specific management needs, but they still come from disparate product groups and lack integration, even overlapping in some areas. They also make little use of emerging standards, such as XML, and they are focused only on managing all-Microsoft systems. Valentine indicated that Microsoft is now developing a strategy to address these problems, by moving away from standalone or point products and working toward integrated tools and solution-oriented offerings. However, during the next several years, the company will make only incremental improvements to SMS, MOM, and Application Center, rather than sweeping changes.

Systems Management Server’s Future

Microsoft made two announcements on the near-term future of SMS, a product that allows organizations to electronically inventory their Windows desktops and servers, deploy software to those computers, make configuration changes across groups of computers, remotely manage computers, and manage software license use across their networks. (For more information on SMS, see "SMS 2.0 Ships" on page 3 of the Mar. 1999 Update.) Coming in 2002 are two new releases: the SMS Value Pack and SMS 2003.

SMS Value Pack

This summer Microsoft will release a free downloadable Value Pack for SMS that will make it easier for existing SMS customers to make their Windows and Office installations more secure and keep them that way. The SMS Value Pack will make it easier to obtain and deploy the latest software patches and updates from Microsoft, giving SMS-equipped sites the ease-of-use benefits of the new Software Update Service. (See "Software Update Service to Ease Patch Distribution" on page 3 of the May 2002 Update.)

The SMS Value Pack will allow administrators to deploy the HFNetChk tool (see "New Security Package, Tool" on page 7 of the Mar. 2002 Update) to collect security patch status for all their Windows desktops and servers. Administrators will then be able to connect back to the Microsoft Corporate Windows Update site and select and import any or all required updates published there, package updates into appropriate groupings, and then use standard SMS targeting, distribution, and installation status monitoring features to deploy these updates.

The Value Pack will also be compatible with the upcoming SMS 2003.

SMS 2003

Formerly known under the code name Topaz, SMS 2003 will go into beta this summer and should replace the three-year-old SMS 2.0 somewhere around year’s end. SMS 2003 is a fairly major update to SMS 2.0 that addresses its most glaring shortcomings. Its major new feature areas are the following:

Support for remote clients, including CE-based devices. New client and server components will support users who roam to different access points on their wired and wireless LANs and who often stay disconnected from the network for prolonged periods. CE and Pocket PC support will come in an add-on module expected to ship 90 to 120 days after SMS 2003, and it will give SMS the ability to inventory and distribute software to docked or wireless CE and Pocket PC devices (but not Palm OS devices).

Integration with Active Directory (AD). Although AD is still not a requirement, SMS 2003 will be able to read and configure itself to be consistent with AD’s organizational units (OUs) and network topology definitions (called "sites"), and then target software or other jobs at computers located within these logical containers.

Software metering subsystem. Software metering will be completely rewritten to be much simpler yet more scalable.

Other improvements will include more efficient use of network bandwidth and better reporting.

Operations Manager’s Future

Valentine announced several upcoming developments for MOM. Introduced last year and based on technology acquired from NetIQ, MOM is an event- and performance-monitoring system that watches over and helps maintain the availability of Windows servers and server applications. Each managed server runs a MOM agent and a "base" rule pack that contains the filtering and alerting logic needed to monitor core operating system functions as well as services like AD and Internet Information Server (IIS). The MOM agent can also run an "application" rule pack that monitors most of Microsoft’s server applications, including Exchange and SQL Server. (For more information on MOM, see "Operations Manager Provides Crucial Infrastructure Support" on page 3 of the Sept. 2001 Update.)

At the Management Summit, Microsoft announced that it would be making the current promotional US$349 price per CPU for each module permanent, dramatically lowering the cost from the original per-CPU prices, which were US$849 for the base module and US$949 for the application pack.

Microsoft also made two other MOM-related announcements and gave additional information on some future MOM developments.

MOM Service Pack (SP) 1

Microsoft will ship the first service pack for MOM in the second half of this year. In addition to the usual bug fixes, this service pack will include new and improved rules for both the base pack and the application pack, and it will provide MOM with "globalization" support for the French, German, and Japanese localizations of Windows 2000. However, the prebuilt rules that come with the base pack and application pack will still not work on localized systems because MOM expects the text of the event messages to be in English. Thus, users of these localized systems cannot exploit the thousands of canned MOM event filters and rules, and instead they must construct their own for the language in question.

SP1 will allow MOM’s back-end components to run on servers using Microsoft’s Clustering Service, and it will now let MOM and SMS share the same SQL Server database server.

Although Microsoft did not make any specific announcement of a post-SP1 MOM product, it indicated that the follow-up to MOM would be redesigned to fully support localized Windows operating systems and server applications. Microsoft also said that the next release would be able to monitor the state of clustered servers as a unit, instead of simply monitoring the individual servers in the cluster.

MOM Server Status Monitoring

Microsoft will ship a new module for MOM called Server Status Monitoring (SSM) in the second half of this year. This module will allow MOM to use WMI to poll and verify the status of services running on other Windows servers without having to install MOM agents on those servers.

SSM will be useful as a troubleshooting tool for MOM administrators, even when the managed servers are running the full MOM agent. Also, for smaller businesses with 10 or fewer servers that need only a simple indication of whether a service is up or down on one of those servers, SSM will be able to do the job at lower cost, since MOM agent licenses are not required on each managed server.

.NET Framework Management Pack

Microsoft also plans to ship a MOM enhancement later in 2002 that will allow it to monitor and manage the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment, a software engine that loads and runs applications written in .NET languages, such as Visual Basic .NET and C#.

Although the current version of MOM can monitor properly instrumented applications running under the CLR, the CLR exposes its own health information, and the new pack will include canned rules that will make it easier to monitor and manage the CLR itself.

Application Center’s Future

Application Center helps organizations manage and monitor Web applications and COM+ applications spread over a farm of servers. (For more information on Application Center, see "Application Center Aims to Simplify Web Clusters" on page 3 of the Apr. 2001 Update.)

Later this year, Microsoft plans to ship the second Application Center service pack. In addition to fixing bugs, Service Pack (SP) 2 will allow Application Center to manage server applications that run on the .NET Framework.

Although Application Center can manage .NET applications to a limited extent without SP2, the new service pack will let Application Center treat .NET assemblies just like COM+ applications and replicate them to members of the server farm, giving Application Center more fine-grained management control of these new .NET applications.

Long-Term Management Plans

Indicating that Microsoft is beefing up its commitment to management, Valentine also disclosed plans to completely restructure the management products over the next three to five years, resulting in two new product lines based on projects currently termed Server Manager and Client Manager. (For more information on the way the current management products map into these two, see the illustration "Microsoft’s Management Roadmap".)

Server Manager. Server Manager will consolidate elements of MOM, Application Center, and some SMS functions into an integrated product targeted specifically at managing server hardware, server applications, and Web services. The product will be focused around compliance with specific service-level agreements and management of server applications.

In addition to traditional management and monitoring of production systems, Server Manager will support "total life-cycle" management of server software during development, testing, preproduction validation, deployment, and production.

Client Manager. Client Manager is the eventual successor to SMS and will also provide some MOM-like monitoring functions for client systems, but it will differ from both current solutions by merging client-side technical support with conventional Windows client management, thereby allowing greater integration with a company's overall business operations. For instance, Client Manager will integrate more tightly with help desk applications so that IT support staff can tie trouble tickets to change control and hardware and software asset management. Client Manager will support maintenance of any Windows-based user device, including nontraditional items like phones, kiosks, tablets, and other devices that run embedded Windows operating systems.

What About the Middle Term?

The Server Manager and Client Manager projects are slated for the fairly distant future, and Microsoft has not presented a detailed roadmap for its current management product line in the one-to-three-year timeframe. Consequently, Microsoft’s customers might find the transition confusing.

One challenge to the strategy is the dependencies between Microsoft's management and server product lines. The two future management products will likely have some dependencies on Microsoft’s next generation of operating systems, code-named Longhorn, and its next version of SQL Server, code-named Yukon. Server Manager may also depend on server products that it manages (such as Exchange, SharePoint Portal Server, and BizTalk Server), which are undergoing a redesign for Longhorn and Yukon. This tricky series of dependencies might delay the release of the two management products and could prove to be a disincentive for Microsoft to invest in interim management products or enhancements that will ultimately be scrapped.

Another big issue involves the evolution of WMI, a core part of today’s MOM and SMS products. WMI is a COM-based abstraction layer through which access to all system and application management data can be unified according to the Common Information Model (CIM) schema, independent of the environment and underlying management protocols. Although the CLR and all .NET objects are exposed as WMI client objects (making them automatically equipped for performance monitoring), future management applications implemented in managed code should not have to transition back out to COM just to access instrumentation data generated by .NET managed applications. Microsoft plans to provide developers with more guidance in this area as the technology matures.

Resources

For a Q&A with Brian Valentine on the Microsoft Management Roadmap, see www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2002/may02/05-03valentineqa.asp.