Microsoft management wares trickle out

Microsoft last week released a handful of software products that are key elements in its drive to develop a comprehensive management platform for Windows, but users and experts say the overall plan needs to be clearer.

The company released Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, a monitoring and performance tool; Virtual Server 2005; and the Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit. Two feature packs for Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 for device management and operating system deployment also were made available.

Microsoft also released the first beta of Windows Update Services, a free Windows server add-on that automates the acquisition and deployment of patches for Windows and other software.

Next year, MOM 2005 and SMS 2003 are expected to be combined into a new product called System Center 2005 that will add data warehousing and reporting features.

The new products are part of Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative, a 10-year plan to create a platform to support a self-managing Windows environment built around hardware, software and applications that can signal to the network their management needs. Rivals such as IBM, HP and Sun are developing similar utility computing platforms.

When Microsoft introduced DSI in 2003, users were happy with the management emphasis but saw it more as a vision and wondered how Microsoft would pull off the complex plan.

To give DSI some meat, Microsoft pulled under the DSI banner its core existing management products – SMS and MOM – and some server tools for resource allocation and operating system deployment.

“I keep watching DSI but until it gets more mainstream . . . and it’s something we know works, we won’t mess with it,” says Arch Willingham, vice president of Parks Construction in Chattanooga, Tenn. Willingham is a satisfied SMS user, but says, “there is nothing out there grabbing us and saying we need to do more.”

Others are more optimistic.

They definitely need to integrate all this management functionality,” says Chris Sackmann, a systems developer for Rackspace Managed Hosting, a hosting provider with 4,000 Windows and 4,000 Unix/Linux servers. “They need to do it because it gives you better oversight into what your enterprise is doing and deeper insight into what each component within your enterprise is doing for your architecture.”

Sackmann says Rackspace is adopting management components, including SMS 2003, MOM 2005 and a beta of the System Center reporting features. “From our perspective, the DSI direction makes total sense.”

Still, Microsoft has major chores ahead, some analysts say.

“Microsoft is taking on big tasks,” says Richard Ptak, an analyst with Ptak, Noel & Associates. “For years they have made billions on software with functionality that was good enough. Now they are realizing that ‘good enough’ has ratcheted up. They have to offer intelligently managed software.” He says Microsoft appears committed to management, but “DSI hasn’t been communicated effectively to the market.”

Last week, Microsoft potentially fueled that skepticism by unveiling its latest DSI concepts – modeling, knowledge and life cycle – which it calls “the three pillars of DSI.” Microsoft provided no details on what knowledge and life cycle entail but said modeling would provide health, configuration and task information on each managed network node.

“Health is how an application behaves across its life cycle, configuration is how an application is set up, and task is how an application behaves and what it does,” says David Hamilton, director of the Windows and enterprise management division at Microsoft.

In the first half of next year, Microsoft plans to support the modeling concept with the release of Visual Studio 2005, which will introduce developers to a core component of DSI called the System Definition Model (SDM). SDM is defined by XML-based documents that are embedded into applications to communicate management and operational needs to the network.

Hamilton says Microsoft provides health models using MOM but won’t start into configuration and task models until the release of Visual Studio 2005 and a capacity-planning tool called Indy, which will ship with the second version of System Center sometime around the release of Longhorn. The Longhorn client is slated for 2006, while the server is scheduled for 2007.

Mostly what Microsoft offers users now are products that have been retrofitted to the DSI model with promises of upgrades.