The first service pack for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005—software for centrally monitoring and managing the health of servers—is now available. Departing from Microsoft's norm of including many new features in service packs, MOM 2005 SP1 consists primarily of bug fixes and performance and reliability improvements. The only significant new features consist of x64 support (for both the MOM server and monitored servers) and support for monitoring servers in disparate Active Directory domain namespaces. (Monitoring 64-bit Itanium servers was already supported by MOM 2005 prior to SP1, but Microsoft has no plans to support the MOM server software on Itanium. However, the SQL Server database used by MOM could reside on an Itanium server.)

The service pack incorporates most of the hotfixes issued since MOM 2005 was released in Sept. 2004, and it also contains fixes for many MOM 2005 management packs—sets of rules and scripts that define healthy behavior of various OS and application software.

The service pack can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/mom/downloads/2005/sp1.mspx.

Detailed MOM 2005 information can be found in "More Polished Operations Manager Nearing Completion" on page 3 of the July 2004 Update and "MOM 2005 Ships with New Licensing Model" on page 18 of the Oct. 2004 Update.