By Peter Pawlak [bio]
Posted: Apr. 19, 2004

• Sidebar: Patch Management Technology to Converge
• Sidebar: Windows Management Technologies
• Illustration: Systems Management Gets Single Leader
• Illustration: Management Product and Technology Roadmap

The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.

Systems management is becoming a major priority at Microsoft: by the end of 2004 the company will deliver several new and substantially enhanced management products and technologies, and all development teams for systems management are now organized under a single leader, Kirill Tatarinov. While details about its radical and long-term Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) remain sketchy, the company will continue taking incremental steps to incorporate systems management into its entire business product line. These changes will deliver important benefits to customers even as work on DSI churns away in the background.

Systems Management No Longer an Afterthought

Systems management is a key factor in improving two deliverables—security and reliability—that are pillars of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative. Manageability is important to enterprise customer satisfaction, and Microsoft plans to highlight manageability as one factor that differentiates Windows from Unix and Linux. In particular, it plans to ensure that the Windows environment allows IT departments to quickly and easily manage software file versions and configuration changes, monitor the health of IT systems and applications, and find and remedy the root causes of problems.

Although the company has made investments in the systems management space for some time, its efforts did not always appear coherent. In some instances, systems management products and technologies overlapped and it was unclear which ones customers should use. Other systems management technologies languished or were not even used or supported by other Microsoft products.

However, a clearer strategy has begun to emerge since Microsoft hired Tatarinov from systems management vendor BMC in 2002 and put him in charge of Microsoft’s management products, such as Systems Management Server (SMS). Microsoft recently expanded Tatarinov’s organization by giving him responsibility for all of the Windows management technologies, including Windows Update Service. (See the organization chart "Systems Management Gets Single Leader".) The company now has a more unified management mission: ensuring that Windows is the most manageable platform for hosting distributed applications, especially those built using the emerging "service-oriented architectures" (SOAs), which use clearly bounded and autonomous components connected by Web services. SOAs can integrate applications spread across OSs and middleware platforms, both within corporations and across the Internet.

The key tenets of Microsoft’s systems management strategy involve both short-term and long-term elements, such as the following:

Build a comprehensive management infrastructure around Windows, SMS, and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM). Microsoft plans to add more management-related technologies to all versions of Windows and to enhance SMS and MOM. Taken together, the three should supply the core tools needed to manage Windows client and server systems.

Microsoft also wants this infrastructure to be widely used so that it will nurture a healthy collection of management knowledge, skills, products, and applications for customers to use and for partners to extend into successful businesses. In particular, acknowledging that heterogeneous systems will always be the norm, Microsoft is developing management technologies that will be open and extensible enough so that its management products will no longer just be for Windows-only shops, but ISV partners will also be able to add support for managing non-Windows systems, such as Linux servers and Palm-based handhelds.

Over the long term, Microsoft wants to optimize its Windows client-side management technology such that a single core agent on each managed computer can serve all of its centralized management products.

Focus on developers. Recognizing that applications will be most easily managed if they are designed and built for manageability from the outset, Microsoft is taking steps to help developers build applications that work better with the Microsoft management infrastructure.

In the short term, Microsoft is setting an example by making its own applications easier to manage. For instance, it now mandates that all server application product groups must produce MOM management packs—sets of rules and scripts that define healthy behavior—for their products.

Over the longer term, the DSI will influence development up front. Beginning with Visual Studio 2005 (code-named Whidbey), Microsoft will include technologies that help developers build more manageable applications that map to the physical characteristics of the environments they will run in. Ultimately, the DSI will enable developers to describe each application component’s requirements into documents that serve both as a basis for design and as an operational policy specification used by management tools, which will be able to identify the cause of policy deviations and take corrective actions automatically.

Make it easier for customers to keep current with patches. Over the short term, Microsoft must help customers keep their Microsoft products up to date with the latest patches, and it is making patching capability a standard part of every Windows OS.

Over the long term, it is looking at ways to consolidate multiple distribution and installation technologies and to dramatically reduce the need to reboot systems following patch installation.

Make it easier to build and manage multiple system images. Windows includes technologies, such as Automated Deployment Services, that allow customers to build and manage machine images for client computers, servers, and eventually even for virtual machines running on its upcoming Virtual Server product. This capability is needed for testing, scaling out server farms, adding new workstations, and in situations in which replacing a computer’s software image is more cost-effective than trying to repair the installation. Over the longer term, Microsoft plans DSI technologies that can automatically and dynamically create server images to add processing capacity or to repair damaged systems.

Guided by this strategy, the company disclosed additional details about its management product and technology plans at the Mar. 2004 Microsoft Management Conference. (See the illustration "Management Product and Technology Roadmap".)

Enhancements, Better Integration for Management Products

In the second half of 2004 Microsoft will enhance two existing management servers, SMS and MOM, and will release System Center, which integrates and leverages SMS and MOM.

No future releases are planned for Application Center Server, Microsoft’s server product for managing farms of servers hosting the Web and business logic tiers of multitier Windows applications. The functions of Application Center will be taken over by Windows Server and a future version of System Center as part of the DSI, in 2007 or later. The current version, Application Center 2000, was released in Mar. 2001. Although mainstream support for Application Center 2000 would normally end June 2006, Microsoft intends to continue mainstream support for this product at least until the release of the version of Windows Server based on the next generation of Windows technology (code-named Longhorn), which is expected in 2006 or 2007.

Systems Management Server Enhancements

SMS enables organizations to manage and inventory hardware and software assets, distribute software, apply patches, track licenses, and remotely diagnose and fix problems on Windows clients and servers.

Microsoft has not yet announced details on the successor of the current version, SMS 2003. However, even though System Center 2005 will include all of SMS’s functionality, Microsoft plans to also carry SMS forward as a distinct product, because the first release of System Center is primarily focused on managing servers rather than desktops.

The second half of 2004 will bring three SMS 2003 enhancements: the OS Deployment Feature Pack, the Device Management Feature Pack, and SMS 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

OS Deployment Feature Pack. This feature pack will support remote deployment of new OS images to existing SMS clients. In its initial release, the OS deployment feature pack will support only the new Windows image format (WIM), first developed for the Automated Deployment Service. Microsoft plans to add support for PowerQuest DriveImage and Symantec Ghost images in the first quarter of 2005, following release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003.

Device Management Feature Pack. This feature pack extends hardware and software inventory, software distribution, and configuration management to mobile devices. Devices can be managed both when attached to a host PC and over a wireless network, without installation of an additional agent. Microsoft recently announced that the feature pack will support Smartphone 2003 devices in addition to the Pocket PC 2003 and Windows CE 4.2 support previously announced. Several partners are extending the feature pack to support Palm, Blackberry, and other devices. (Microsoft already supports the management of XP Embedded systems with the SMS 2003 Advanced Client.)

SMS 2003 SP1. In addition to the usual rollup of bug fixes, SMS 2003’s first service pack will add core support for the SMS feature packs and will add support for managing several additional customer scenarios, such as computers not joined to a Windows domain, 64-bit Windows, Virtual PC, and Virtual Server. SP1 should ship in the fourth quarter of 2004.

SMS Patch Management Update. In the first quarter of 2005, Microsoft will release an update that contains new patch-scanning and installation tools that share common technology with Window’s new built-in patch maintenance features.

New Operations Manager Coming

MOM enables administrators to monitor the health and performance of Windows servers. MOM centrally monitors servers for relevant events, such as when a needed service has stopped running, and can take corrective actions automatically based on configurable and customizable rules and scripts.

The current version, MOM 2000, will be replaced in the second half of 2004 with MOM 2005. (It was formerly named MOM 2004, but according to Microsoft’s current naming practices, any products released in the second half of the calendar year get labeled with the following year.) Microsoft will also release a new, simpler version optimized for smaller customers, named MOM 2005 Express. As with SMS, Microsoft plans to continue to offer stand-alone versions of MOM even though its functionality will be encompassed within System Center.

MOM 2005. Now in beta, MOM 2005 will add features such as a new operator's console for checking the health of critical systems, an improved reporting system based on SQL Server Reporting Services, and a Web services interface for two-way integration between MOM and management systems, such as IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console and Hewlett-Packard OpenView. Although MOM 2005 will run MOM 2000 management packs, new MOM 2005 management packs will be necessary to fully exploit new MOM capabilities.

MOM 2005 Express. MOM 2005 will be available in an "express" version for managing fewer than 10 servers. Less expensive and simpler to install, MOM 2005 Express still uses the same technologies as its bigger sibling, while allowing smaller businesses to take advantage of MOM’s sophisticated monitoring.

First System Center Due in 2004

For managing servers, combining SMS’s asset and change management features with MOM’s monitoring features would offer systems management capabilities that neither product has on its own. For example, IT administrators could diagnose problems faster by correlating software or hardware changes (recorded by SMS) with changes in alert levels (detected by MOM). Furthermore, by storing and analyzing a subset of the information SMS and MOM collects, customers can spot trends over months or years, even though both normally only store data for a limited time. These ideas are the basis for System Center, which will later evolve to become Microsoft’s key product for managing DSI-enabled system components.

System Center 2005. Shipping after MOM 2005 but before the end of 2004, this combination of SMS 2003 and MOM 2005 will offer modest integration of the two products and some additional features that are not available in those products. The SMS and MOM functions will share a common SQL Server database and SQL Reporting Services, and System Center 2005 will come with reports that use SQL Server’s OLAP features to aggregate and analyze a data warehouse containing management data extracted from the two sources.

System Center version 2 and version 3. The successors to System Center 2005—System Center version 2 and its follow-on, System Center version 3—will increasingly embrace new DSI-specific technologies being built into the OS and Visual Studio. By analyzing the information gleaned from the components being managed, Microsoft says that these products will offer "desired-state" monitoring and performance-modeling capabilities unavailable in any of today’s management products. In addition, because components built for the DSI contain information on their interdependencies, this version of System Center will be able to perform root cause analysis, that is, determining which system event or configuration change was ultimately responsible for a change in system performance or reliability. System Center version 2 is planned for roughly the same time as the Longhorn OS (2006 at the earliest), and version 3 probably two or more years later.

Patch Management Enhanced, Unified

Much Windows management technology is embedded in the OS, and most Windows management components will wait until the client and server releases of Longhorn to get improvements. (See the sidebar "Windows Management Technologies".) However, patch maintenance will be improved through a revamp of the Windows Update Web site and interim releases of two enhancements. Originally planned to ship as part of Windows XP Service Pack 1, the two enhancements—Windows Update Service and the Microsoft Installer 3.0—will be free to licensed users and will ship separately later in 2004.

Microsoft Update and Windows Update Service

To better help end users and IT departments keep their Microsoft software current with the most recent patches, the company is redesigning its Windows Update Web site as a new site called Microsoft Update and is also redesigning Version 1.0 of the Software Update Service (SUS) to become the Windows Update Service (WUS), which allows an organization to designate one or more internal servers to pull down patches and to publish only approved patches for automatic installation on managed PCs.

Microsoft Update. The new name for the Update Web site better reflects the fact that it will now include patches for all Microsoft products. The site will eventually publish patches, service packs, drivers, and patch applicability criteria for all Microsoft products, including the Office System and the Windows Server System products.

Windows Update Service. Windows XP’s and Windows Server 2003’s Automatic Update client-side patch-installer agent and SUS 1.0 will be replaced by WUS 2.0 equivalents, currently in beta. The new agent will be capable of installing any software package published by the Microsoft Update site. It will also include a new Microsoft-developed scanner to replace the current HFNetChk scanner developed by Shavlik Technologies. The scanner will use a new patch applicability data format to check whether any of the Microsoft products installed on the PC need updating.

WUS 2.0 also comes with a new server-side component that provides many features that SUS 1.0 lacked, such as status reporting and more granular targeting.

Although SMS 2003 still provides superior patching capabilities for the most complex, demanding environments in addition to its other functions, WUS is free, and Microsoft claims it will meet the most basic software updating needs of organizations of all sizes. Furthermore, WUS technology will find its way into a future release of SMS. (See the sidebar "Patch Management Technology to Converge".)

Microsoft Installer 3.0

Microsoft has promised to reduce its numerous software and patch-installation technologies to two by the end of 2004: the Update.exe installation engine and a new version of the Microsoft Installer (MSI) service, with both technologies using a common set of installation switches. Update.exe is designed for installing and patching OS components and patching current server applications such as Exchange.

The improvements in Version 3.0 of MSI focus on making patching faster, more reliable, and easier to build and manage. MSI 3.0 can be used to install or patch applications built for earlier versions of MSI, and Microsoft claims that all future non-OS products will be installed and maintained using MSI technology.

DSI Update

A precise definition of the DSI is still evolving, but the company envisions it as a radical change in the way applications are developed, deployed, and operated over their life cycles. Most important: rather than support manageability through add-on, generic management products that incorporate little or no knowledge of specific applications or hardware, manageability will be built into applications, system software, and hardware from the outset.

DSI will accomplish this with a common management infrastructure that spans all elements needed for an application to function properly, and a System Definition Model (SDM) that will provide a Microsoft-standard method for building management knowledge into each hardware or software component during its design. Each component will have its own SDM, an XML document with all the information required to manage that component, including dependencies on OS components or other services, definitions of settings that can be configured through OS policy, definitions of variables and counters required to monitor the health of the component, and so on. Among other things, this will enable a new breed of business applications that use SDM information to form operational policies, and management tools which can detect when the overall system departs from those policies and flag what caused the departure.

Microsoft revealed very little new information about DSI at the Mar. 2004 Microsoft Management Summit. The initiative is moving forward: DSI underwent its first design preview in Mar. 2004, where about 150 attendees, including many major ISVs and IHVs, had a chance to review early SDM specifications and give Microsoft feedback. The company has also not yet said whether developers’ efforts to make applications more manageable in shorter term, such as writing and reading from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) layer, will be compatible with the management techniques used by DSI.

Although Microsoft has begun to lump some current and upcoming management product releases under the DSI label, the first new technology to embrace the DSI will appear in Visual Studio 2005 (code-named Whidbey) next year. Code-named Whitehorse, this technology will include some Visio-like tools that allow software designers and IT system architects to communicate requirements and collaborate through a process called "design time validation," which will flag problems and bad design assumptions at design time, avoiding problems later when the product is implemented.

The follow-up to Visual Studio 2005, code-named Orcas and due after Longhorn, will be the first Microsoft development platform to support the creation of SDM-enabled applications.

However, the real meat—SDM-instrumented hardware and software components, and products such as System Center version 3 that manage them using the SDM information—will not appear until far in the future, probably 2008 at the earliest. In the meantime, companies should not hesitate to take advantage of Microsoft's current generation of management technologies, as the details and timeframe of DSI remain uncertain.

Resources

The information in this article updates the System Management roadmap information found in the March 2004 edition of the Directions on Microsoft "Enterprise Product Roadmap," which summarizes current and planned versions of Microsoft's most important enterprise products.