Operations Manager Now on Windows Server 2008

With the addition of recently released updates, the Operations Manager monitoring product can run on and monitor Windows Server 2008 servers. The updates will particularly benefit organizations that want to move infrastructure servers (such as file servers) to the new OS and monitor those servers with Operations Manager or the related System Center Essentials bundle. However, the OS must have several hotfixes applied to it before it will work with Operations Manager, and more updates will be needed to match the monitoring features of earlier versions of the product and OS.

OM, Essentials, and Windows Server Need Updates

The updates apply to System Center Operations Manager (OM) 2007 SP1 and System Center Essentials 2007 SP1, a bundle that includes a scaled-down version of OM. The updates enable the OM agent to manage and monitor Windows Server 2008 servers. The updates also enable the product’s management server roles to run on the new OS. However, OM with the updates still does not fully support the new Windows Server 2008 Server Core configuration. That is, a server running the Server Core configuration can be monitored, but it cannot run the OM management roles. Also, OM by itself is not sufficient for monitoring virtual machines running under Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008 built-in hypervisor technology for virtualization.