How the Rest of System Center Fits into Your Private
Cloud Architecture
In this chapter, I’ve touched on several components of System Center 2016, such as
Virtual Machine Manager, Orchestrator, and Service Manager. Other components,
although not key private-cloud building blocks, are still important to a complete
infrastructure.
Fabric management and deployment of services are critical. However, to ensure the
ongoing health of the fabric, the Hyper-V hypervisor, the virtual machines, and the
applications running inside the virtual machines, monitoring is necessary to safeguard
the long-term availability and health of the environment.
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) provides a rich monitoring solution for
Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems, applications, and hardware. Any
monitoring solution can tell you when something is broken. SCOM does that, but its
real power is in its proactive nature and best-practice adherence functionality. SCOM
management packs are units of knowledge about a specific application or component.
For example, there is an Exchange Management Pack, and there is a Domain Name
System (DNS) for the Windows Server management pack. The Microsoft mandate is
that any Microsoft product should have a management pack that is written by the
product team responsible for the application or operating system component. All the
knowledge of those developers, the people who create best-practice documents, is
used to create these management packs that you can then just deploy to your
environment. Operations Manager then raises alerts of potential problems or when
best practices are not being followed. Customers often raise objections that when
Operations Manager is first implemented, it floods them with alerts. Well, this could
be for several reasons; perhaps the environment has a lot of problems that should be
fixed, but often Operations Manager will be tuned to ignore configurations that, while
perhaps not best practice, are accepted by the organization.
Many third parties provide management packs for their applications and hardware
devices. When I think of all about the application as a key tenant of the private cloud,
the ability for Operations Manager to monitor from the hardware, storage, network,
and everything all the way through the OS to the application is huge, but it goes even
further in Operations Manager 2012 and beyond.
System Center Operations Manager 2012 introduced changes, and two huge ones
focus on network monitoring and custom application monitoring. First, Microsoft
licensed technology from EMC called Smarts that enables a rich discovery and
monitoring of network devices. With this network discovery and monitoring
functionality, Operations Manager can identify the relationship between network
devices and services to understand, for instance, that port 3 on this switch connects to
server A; then if a switch problem occurs, Operations Manager will know the affected
servers. Information such as CPU and memory information (among other