Dynamic Systems Initiative Update

A Microsoft project, the Dynamic Systems Initiative, is developing technology to manage software more effectively and enable organizations to quickly reconfigure systems and identify problems. The central idea: Developers should ship software with the information required to manage it. Specifically, developers should ship configuration models that describe the components that software includes or relies on, and health models that describe normal and problematic modes of behavior of the software, and the types of data that can be collected on its behavior.

Operations Manager 2007 will be the first version to support monitoring using software configuration and health models; it will be able to use them to identify failing components and trace the root causes of events. Similarly, Configuration Manager 2007 will begin to make use of software configuration models, enabling administrators to configure all of a computer’s applications and OS components to match a desired state, rather than configuring each application and system component independently.