Operations Manager R2 is RTMed

Its finally here!.. the official announcement that Operations Manager R2 is RTM was done late yesterday.

Some of the key enhancements are:

1. Monitoring of Unix and Linux natively
2. Service Level Tracking through detailed reports
3. New Process Monitoring Template, OLEDB Template, Windows servive template
4. Import MPs direct from the console
5. Overrides Summary view
6. View Health explorer via the Web Console
7. One-click maintenance mode that turns all neccessary objects appropriately
8. Console performance is fantastic!!

Read the full post of available datasheets, whitepapers, videos on Sacha's post http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/05/22/om2007r2-rtm.aspx

TechNet Operations Manager Forums new home

Its moved!

The Forum site for Operations Manager on Technet has moved to http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

As usual, MSFT folks and the MVPs are frequent flyers on the posts. My man Anders Bengston is probably going to light this one up too :)

OpsMgr R2 Upcoming Solutions: Novell Suse Management Pack

At MMS this year, i had a chat with Alex at the Novell booth and he also showed me a demo on what's coming in the Novell System Center Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

The Management Pack contains ready monitors for BIND/DNS, DHCP, Samba, OpenLDAP, SUSE Firewall and CUPS.

Plucking the following info from the Novell Beta MP program, here is what Novell says that the MP will include:

• Discovery of SLES servers based on MS Cross platform discovery wizard
• Automatic deployment of plug-ins for the management agent
• For all services to report the state of the service running vs not-running
• For all services to stop/start/restart the service
• View alerts for most services
• Keep track of allocated IP addresses by DHCP service
• Statistical information for BIND/DNS service
• Able to monitor Samba shares, connections, sessions
• Provides connection information for OpenLDAP

I hope to find time to test this soon and report on it

SystemCenterCentral.com

Founded by my buddies and fellow OpsMgr MVPs Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet, System Center Central is all about.. well.. you guessed it.. Microsoft System Center. Supported by Microsoft themselves and several other sponsors such as Quest Software, the objective of this portal is to bring everyone together globally to one single location to learn, understand and share all knowledge aobut System Center.

On top of this, there have been several User Groups that have now re-located to System Center Central including our System Center User Group of Malaysia (SCUG.MY).

If you are passionate about System Center or even getting started with it, I urge you to login to www.systemcentral.com today and be part of the new wave.