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First insight into SCOM 2012: What’s up next…

There were actually quite some sessions which gave a good preview of the SCOM2012 version which is pre-beta now and will become RTM by the end of 2012.

Until then more and more features will be communicated.

One of the most interesting features actually is that SCOM 2012 will tackle one of the biggest nightmares of all SCOM admins: the SPOF which is called RMS. All SCOM admins will have to admit that at one point or another they faced problems with their RMS which was acting up funny. In SCOM 2007 you are only allowed to run one RMS which is actually a MS which has the Root MS role. The SDK service can only and exclusively run on this machine making it the hart of your SCOM environment.

Your environment is highly impacted when your RMS is down.

The consciences:

  • You cannot perform any admin tasks
  • All consoles (including web) connect to RMS and will not open
  • Product connectors depend on RMS and therefore they can not get info out of SCOM.
  • Subscriptions depend on RMS therefore you will not have notifications.
RMS becomes “Management Pool”

RMS_gone

Fortunately this is tackled in SCOM 2012 by a new organization of the management servers. RMS which was introduced in SCOM 2007 will be history. In fact all the management servers (MS) will be automatically joined to a management pool which will all have the SDK service running. Because all the MS have the SDK service running they can all perform the task of the old RMS

This has some nice advantages:

  • MS can easily be added and removed because there’s a automatic failover between all the MS which are in the management pool
  • There’s no need for clustering in the management servers any more to assure high availability of the RMS.
  • High availability is now available out of the box!
  • MS share the workload over the entire management pool.

The management pool is automatically created when you install the first MS and it will automatically add all MS’s which are installed afterwards.

Pretty cool feature if you ask me Smile

New network monitoring features

infoblox-microsoft-scom-integrationSeems like Microsoft Really beefed up the network monitoring features. There’s a complete new way of discovering new devices which are in your environment. A nice cool feature is the map which is drawn of your network. You can also check which components are in the vicinity of the troublesome device so this can be very helpful in case of a faulty device.

  • The network will be drawn in nice topology maps and the monitoring will have some cool gauges / dashboards to make network monitoring much more clean and sleek.
  • MSFT plans to support roughly 90, IIRC, vendors out of the box so not much customization needed and more time to tackle the real day to day issues!
  • Monitoring includes all the small bits and bolts of your network like Network Port monitoring, memory counters, VLAN health, HSRP health, connection health at end points

Enough talk, let’s build
Something together.