Dynamic Systems Initiative Update

The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft’s long-term project to improve the manageability of its products and the systems that run them. Key technologies under development in the project include the following:

Virtualization technologies speed system setup, reconfiguration, and recovery by enabling complete application and OS configurations to be stored and moved among computers. Six months after Windows Server 2008, Microsoft plans to ship an OS feature called Windows Server Virtualization, which enables multiple OS configurations to run on a computer in isolated “virtual machines.” A complementary technology called SoftGrid, which enables applications on a computer to be loaded from a remote server and run in isolated virtual OS environments, is available to customers who have Software Assurance on the Windows client OS. (See the “Virtualization” section of the “Windows” chapter.)

Management models contain the operational knowledge needed by systems management products (such as Configuration Manager and Operations Manager) and to find, configure, and monitor the health of system components. Operations Manager 2007 uses models in Microsoft’s SDM language, which in turn is Microsoft’s contribution to the Service Modeling Language (SML), a modeling language being developed with other vendors, including BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Sun. Configuration Manager 2007 is the first Microsoft product to use SML and employs the language for its desired configuration management feature. The vendors hope that a standard modeling language like SML and standard libraries of system components could ultimately simplify systems management, just as standard programming languages and libraries have simplified software development.