At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in 2008, Microsoft's annual conference on managing the Windows platform, Microsoft announced the upcoming enhancement of cross-platform monitoring, also known as X-Plat. Not only was OpsMgr going to change to encompass monitoring of non-Windows platforms, but the code would be open source. To add some humor to what was a seismic shift in direction by the company (pigs would fly!), Microsoft distributed pigs...with wings, an illustration of which is displayed inFigure 1.4.
Pigs flew when Microsoft announced cross-platform monitoring for OpsMgr.
X-Plat was initially going to be part of a service pack; however, at TechEd-Europe in November 2008, Microsoft announced that X-Plat and other changes would be bundled into an R2 release.
In addition to extending OpsMgr 2007 monitoring capabilities to Unix and Linux environments using the familiar Operations Manager console, R2’s integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 enables maximizing availability of virtual workloads. But that’s not all—in addition to getting a facelift with new skins (seeFigure 1.5), the R2 release includes numerous other performance and functionality enhancements. R2 also resolves quite a few bugs and incorporates a number of hotfixes—see KB article 971410 athttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/971410/for the list.
NOTE: RENAMED COMPONENTS AND SERVICES -As part of the OpsMgr R2 release, Microsoft has renamed the Operations Manager Command Shell to Operations Manager Shell. The three Windows services used in OpsMgr deployments are renamed as well:
- The OpsMgr SDK Service is now System Center Data Access.
- The OpsMgr Health Service became System Center Management.
- The OpsMgr Config Service is System Center Management Configuration.
The new skin of the R2 Operations console
Successive chapters of this book cover in detail many of the new features in R2, with the remainder of this chapter discussing those topics not discussed elsewhere.