By Peter Pawlak [bio]             See more recent article on Management Roadmap (May 2004)
Posted: Apr. 14, 2003

• Illustration: Enterprise Management Group Roadmap

The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.

Two systems management products, Systems Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), will each be updated during the next year and then will be merged into a bundle called System Center Suite, according to Microsoft's updated management product roadmap. Over time, System Center Suite will evolve into a single, fully integrated product leveraging future Windows technologies to be introduced as part of Microsoft’s Dynamic Services Initiative. However, the company gave few details on how this integration will happen, how much technology the initiative will preserve from the current management products, and which of its disparate management groups will be driving the transition.

After Windows "Blackcomb" (the server release that will follow Windows Server 2003) and System Center ship, Application Center Server, Microsoft’s server farm management and monitoring product, will be discontinued because its functions will be incorporated into the other two products.

This roadmap, announced at the Mar. 2003 Microsoft Management Summit, represents a departure from the one announced at the previous year’s summit, in which two future products, code-named Client Manager and Server Manager, split the duties of System Center. (For a graphical overview showing how various management products will evolve, see "Enterprise Management Group Roadmap".)

SMS 2003 Coming First

Microsoft’s Enterprise Management Group has announced it plans to ship SMS 2003—an update of the current SMS 2.0 product—in Sept. 2003. This is roughly nine months later than the expected ship date that Microsoft first announced a year ago.

SMS allows organizations to electronically inventory the hardware and software on their Windows desktops and servers, deploy software to those computers, make configuration changes across groups of computers, remotely manage computers, and manage software licenses.

SMS 2003’s most significant improvements are in the following areas:

Advanced client. Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 can run a new SMS client specifically designed to manage laptops better. The SMS 2.0 client was poorly suited for managing laptops—which often run disconnected from the corporate network or connect from varying locations on the network—because it was not designed for frequent movement from one SMS server site to another. Mobility issues aside, the advanced client also has improved security and performance, making it work better on servers and fixed desktops as well.

Like the Windows Automatic Update client for downloading patches from the Windows Update Service, the new SMS client uses the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to download files. BITS has built-in checkpoint/restart and bandwidth throttling features, which allows software installation package downloads to use available bandwidth and intermittent connectivity more efficiently—a feature that is especially important when users connect over wireless LANs or limited-bandwidth VPNs, or when they frequently disconnect from the network while SMS downloads are under way.

Web reports. SMS 2003 includes a new Web-based reporting system that makes it more convenient for IT personnel and management to view reports of consolidated SMS inventory data. (Note that this new reporting system is not based on the new SQL Server Reporting Services, code-named Rosetta.)

Active Directory (AD) integration. SMS 2003’s integration with AD makes it possible for administrators to target SMS-based software deployments based on a computer or user’s membership within organizational units, user groups, machine groups, and Exchange distribution groups. It also uses AD’s site definitions to map clients to the appropriate SMS servers given their network location.

Patch distribution. SMS 2003 will get the ability to target, distribute, and install security and other software patches that was first provided by the SUS Feature Pack for SMS 2.0. (See "Feature Packs Aid SMS Administrators" on page 11 of the Dec. 2002 Update.)

Improved metering. SMS’s metering software has been completely rewritten to improve performance, and it can now track software application usage by users across all managed machines, even when users work disconnected from the network. (The client uploads usage reports the next time a connection is available to its SMS server.)

The most important factor for many customers, however, is not on the feature list: when SMS 2003 ships, it will have undergone much more testing than its predecessor. In addition to extensive internal production testing by Microsoft’s own IT department, many large Early Adopter Program (EAP) customers are already running SMS 2003 in production environments, helping Microsoft eliminate many problems that don’t show up in small test environments.

SMS 2003 Feature Pack

It appears that the SMS team intends to continue its recent practice of using service packs only to fix bugs and security problems, while introducing new features through separate downloadable feature packs. In spring 2004, the company intends to offer SMS 2003’s first feature pack, with improvements in two main areas:

Support for Windows CE devices. Microsoft will develop a new SMS client agent for Windows CE–based devices, especially devices running the current Pocket PC 2002 and the upcoming Pocket PC 2003 platforms. (At this time, Microsoft has no plans to support this client on Windows Smartphones because of the OS’s requirement that all applications are digitally signed.) With this agent, SMS will be able to inventory the supported CE devices and distribute software to them over wireless LAN and wireless WAN networks, as well as via the devices' data docks.

Disk image support. Although SMS can install OS upgrades in addition to applications, it cannot install a complete system image today. With the feature pack, SMS 2003 will be able to push out a complete system image to a spare disk partition, and then use the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) to install the image into the primary disk partition following a reboot. At a minimum, Microsoft will support imaging tools from Powerquest and Symantec.

MOM 2004 Later

Early in 2004, Microsoft plans to ship the next release of MOM. MOM is an event- and performance-monitoring system (consisting of client and server components) that watches over and helps maintain the availability of Windows servers and server applications. Each managed server runs a MOM agent and a "base" rule pack that contains the filtering and alerting logic needed to monitor core OS functions and services like AD and Internet Information Server (IIS). The MOM agent can also run application rule packs for monitoring Microsoft’s server applications, such as Exchange and SQL Server.

Although MOM 2004 is not yet in beta testing, Microsoft has disclosed plans to focus its new capabilities in the following areas:

New console. Although the current MOM 2000 has both a console based on the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for configuring and managing MOM itself and a Web console for displaying MOM alerts, MOM 2004 will get a new, more extensible Web console. This new console is intended to allow MOM to serve as a master console that handles alerts not only from MOM but also from other management systems, such as Hewlett-Packard OpenView. This is a crucial step in getting third-party management software vendors to build MOM-compatible tools, which in turn is key to using MOM to manage non-Windows systems.

"Yukon" database. MOM 2004 will be the first Microsoft server application to depend on the next version of SQL Server, which will use the new Yukon storage and search engine. Although the technical benefits this will bring to MOM are not yet clear, it does mean that any slips to the Yukon schedule could affect MOM 2004’s availability.

Web reporting. MOM 2004 will use SQL Server’s upcoming "Reporting Services" Web-based managed report engine (code-named Rosetta), which is much more powerful and usable than MOM 2000’s Access-based reports, and which will eventually become the underlying reporting technology for all Microsoft server products that need to produce reports. Users will have links to reports from the new operator console, from other Web pages, and from e-mail.

Better usability. Microsoft hopes to make MOM 2004 easier to set up with an appropriate set of prebuilt management rules and reports, and it will finally become language-neutral, letting it work properly with non-English versions of Windows and other Microsoft server applications it manages.

Product teams oversee application packs. Another change, already begun with the current version of MOM, is that responsibility for developing the application packs for Microsoft’s server products has shifted from the MOM product team to the respective product groups. In some cases, such as with Exchange 2003 (code-named Titanium and expected in summer 2003), the MOM application pack will be bundled with the product. Although this move should theoretically result in better management packs (since the individual product teams should know the behavior of their products better than the MOM team), it could be a drawback if the management pack is cut or its functionality is reduced when a product group needs to make a ship deadline.

Product Convergence Lies Ahead

At the spring 2002 Microsoft Management Summit, the company announced plans to completely restructure its management products over the next three to five years, resulting in two new product lines based on projects termed Server Manager and Client Manager. Then, at the Microsoft Enterprise Conference in fall 2002, it demonstrated prototypes of these projects that showed some of the new ideas—many quite innovative—that were being considered for these projects.

Since that time, Microsoft has rethought these plans and has decided to consolidate these projects into a single product offering it will call System Center. The product will be released in two stages: a bundle of current management products followed by a more fully integrated version.

System Center Suite

Late in 2004, Microsoft plans to offer System Center Suite, a combination of SMS 2003 and MOM 2004 that will have a modest amount of integration and some additional features that are not currently in the component products.

Both the SMS and MOM functions will share a common Yukon-based SQL Server database and Reporting Services, and System Center Suite will come with reports that use SQL Server’s OLAP features to aggregate and analyze management data from the two sources.

System Center

Eventually, the System Center Suite will evolve into System Center (code-named Sydney): a unified management product that exploits new Windows technology spawned from Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI; see "Long-Term Plan for Manageability Announced" in the May 2003 issue of Update). DSI is a far-reaching plan to build manageability into applications, system software, and hardware from the outset rather than adding it on later. The DSI will accomplish this with a common management infrastructure that spans all elements of the system and a System Definition Model (SDM) that provides a Microsoft-standard XML-based method of building management knowledge into each hardware or software component during its design.

No details were released about System Center, but Microsoft claims it will "deliver management solutions for change and configuration management, asset management, end-to-end application management, IT process orchestration, performance trending, reporting, and capacity planning, built on a unified management infrastructure."

The "unified management infrastructure" refers to DSI technology that won’t fully come together until the Blackcomb release of Windows Server, which will be 2006 at the earliest. The "performance trending" refers to a technology code-named Indy that came out of Microsoft Research. Indy uses modeling and simulation technology to allow system planners to determine performance bottlenecks, simulate the effects of changes, and find ways to optimize use of available resources.

Microsoft has not released information on how System Center will work with heterogeneous systems. However, because Microsoft is positioning it as the core of enterprise management, and CIOs are unlikely to consider it unless it can manage heterogeneous systems, this functionality is likely to be supported in some fashion. However, it’s likely Microsoft will publish standard interfaces and relegate support of non-Windows systems to other management vendors.

Application Center Server Gets Maintenance Only

Application Center Server, Microsoft’s product for helping organizations manage and monitor Web applications and COM+ applications spread over a farm of servers, has a limited future.

Over the next two to three years, it will continue to get service packs as needed. However, since System Center will be designed to monitor server farms, and Blackcomb’s DSI technology will handle deployment and configuration of server farms along with their applications and other software components, Application Center will eventually be discontinued following Blackcomb’s release.

No Central Management Leadership

One problem is that there is no single coordinator for Microsoft’s management strategy.

Management requires a great deal of hardware and OS support, and under the DSI even more management capabilities will be built into Blackcomb. However, Microsoft has been unable to put together a cohesive picture of how the underlying Windows management technology will evolve and how it will fit with the SMS and MOM management products. Areas of confusion include the following:

Software installation. SMS (overseen by the Enterprise Management Group) and Group Policy and the Automatic Update (AU) service (overseen by the Windows Division) can both automate software installation. Because each of these offerings was designed at different times for different scenarios, there is practically no common core technology, yet great potential for consolidation and coordination exists. For example, the SMS 2003 advanced client will use the BITS download technology first developed for AU.

Patch management. Microsoft currently issues patches that use at least four different patching approaches, including manual file copies, scripts, the Windows system patching format, and the Windows Installer patching format.

Disk image installation. Even though the SMS 2003 Feature Pack will support push installation of new disk images produced by third-party disk imaging tools, Microsoft has not clarified how it will treat disk image installation as it moves forward: the Windows Server team already has a service (the Remote Installer Service, or RIS) for supporting script-driven Windows installation, but it is developing a new image-based technology called Automated Deployment Services (ADS) for rapidly building "bare metal" server replicas. Although RIS is targeted more at building workstations, the ADS core technology could also replace RIS in the future.

Web-based management. As part of the .NET Management Services Initiative that Microsoft launched in Oct. 2000, the company promised Web service interfaces to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and a Web–based management interface to replace the MMC called the Microsoft Management Portal. Yet over the past year the company has been silent on this initiative.

Group Policy-based management. Microsoft has also not specified how management based on the Windows Group Policy mechanism will evolve in the future. Today’s AD-based Group Policy is closely tied to the Windows Registry, but Microsoft has begun to move toward more generalized policy mechanisms for centrally managing applications that store their settings in XML files, especially .NET applications written in managed code. The new SMS 2003 Advanced Client uses one such mechanism for centrally managing its settings, but it’s clear that XML policy file distribution should be a Windows service available to any application.

Microsoft may be ready to clarify much of this confusion at the fall 2003 Professional Developers Conference.

Resources

For more on management capabilities of Windows 2003, see the Apr. 2003 Research Report "Improving PC Management with Windows Server 2003."

For more information on SMS, see "SMS 2.0 Ships" on page 3 of the Mar. 1999 Update.

For more information on SMS 2003, see www.microsoft.com/smserver/evaluation/future.

For more information on MOM 2000, see "Operations Manager Provides Crucial Infrastructure Support" on page 3 of the Sept. 2001 Update

For more on Reporting Services, see "Reporting Services Planned for SQL Server" on page 15 of the Mar. 2003 Update.