You've probably heard about Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), which has been
renamed System Center Operations Manager (Ops Manager). If your organization
is like most small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), however, you probably realize
that these tools offer diminishing returns if you don't have the manpower to
implement and maintain them properly, or if the size of your PC and server fleet
isn't large enough to warrant management by large-scale tools such as Operations
Manager.
That said, a lot of IT shops
are caught between the need
for an efficient solution to
monitor and manage the
operations of their fleet and
the ominous complexity of the
solutions available to date.
Enter System Center Essentials
2007 (SCE). Microsoft is targeting SCE to SMBs, touting its
simplified interfaces and processes for managing as many
as 15 servers and 500 desktops (as of press time; these
numbers could change). To see
how well Microsoft can deliver
on this promise, I took the Beta
2 release of SCE through its
paces in a test environment.
Installation
Out of the gate, Microsoft creates some reasonably stout prerequisites for installing
SCE. Supported OSs are Windows Server 2003 Standard and Enterprise Editions,
Service Pack 1 (SP1); Windows 2003 R2 Standard and Enterprise; or Small Business
Server 2003 SP1. Additionally, you need Microsoft Internet Information Services
(IIS) 6.0; Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 2.0; Microsoft Data
Access Components (MDAC) 2.80.1022.0 or later; Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
and .NET Framework 3.0. You need about 3.5GB of free disk space on the C drive
for the installation. I attempted to point the installation of components to
an alternate drive with plenty of free space, but there was no working around
the disk-space check and I had to make room on my C drive before proceeding
with the installation.
During setup, I was prompted to install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
or point to an existing SQL Server installation for the System Center Database.
I chose to install SQL Server Express. I then had to choose whether I wanted
to store updates for client computers on the server or let the clients go to
the Internet for their updates. You'll need to weigh the pros and cons of each
option, considering your available server disk space, number of clients, and
connection to the Internet. I chose to store the updates on the server and specified
the disk location where updates would be stored. I was then prompted to enter
an account with access to all client systems that would be used to perform management
tasks on client systems. The full installation, complete with SQL Server Express
and database creation, took about 15 minutes on my dual-core Intel Xeon 2.4GHz
server.
Configuration
Before you can start to use SCE, you must complete three configuration tasks.
The tasks, which you'll see the first time you open the console, rely on wizards
to help you configure SCE product features, computers and devices to be managed,
and settings for Microsoft Update.
The Product Feature wizard prompts you to select SCE's parameters. Settings
include whether to use a proxy server, whether to create a Group Policy Object
(GPO) for managed devices, client system remote control, and Agentless Exception
Monitoring. Although you can configure and use SCE by using local policy, you
reap better centralized control of your environment and will need to jump through
fewer hoops, such as manually opening firewall ports, if you take advantage
of Group Policy. The wizard ran through the configuration options I specified
and completed all steps successfully.
I then ran the Computer and Device Management configuration wizard, which performs
a discovery of computers and network devices, lets you select which ones you
want to manage, then performs agent installation on any managed systems you
select. The wizard lets you select either Auto or Advanced discovery options.
I used the Auto option, and my three Windows XP client systems were discovered
in less than a minute. I selected all three systems for management and the agent
was queued for installation on the systems. All three, however, failed because
they didn't have Windows Installer 3.1. I downloaded the required version from
Microsoft and installed it on the three XP systems, but I had to go through
the discovery process again to retry the agent installation. On the next attempt,
the agent installation was again unsuccessful. This time, however, I was directed
to look at the log files to determine the source of the problem. The logs turned
up nothing, but I did refer back to the system requirements document and noticed
my problem: Although SCE supports a wide array of managed computer OSs, including
Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP must be updated to at least SP2 to run. I don't
have a complaint about the requirement for SP2, but tasks such as deploying
SP2 are one big way in which SCE should be able to help smaller IT shops. It
would be nice if Microsoft could find a way to help SCE users automate getting
their PC fleet up to snuff as part of the deployment of this tool rather than
saddling potential customers with the task of manually managing software prerequisites.
After ensuring that the test clients all met the requirements, I tried the
discovery process one more time. This time the agent successfully installed
on all three of my test clients.
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