Introduction to the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Design Guide
Applies To: Operations Manager 2007 R2, Operations Manager 2007 SP1
Every IT environment is unique, and therefore the infrastructure used to monitor it must accommodate that uniqueness in order to be effective. There is no "one-size-fits-all" solution to monitoring that delivers a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, companies cannot afford to custom develop monitoring solutions from the ground up. The amount of money and effort required to do this is prohibitive.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 strikes a balance between these two points by providing the building blocks necessary for a solution that accommodates your business needs. How you arrange the building blocks and the relationships that you establish between them is up to you and is referred to as topology planning. Your topology must be driven by the business, technology, security, and regulatory needs of your company, and it is during the design process that the uniqueness of your particular environment is built into your Operations Manager topology.
Prior to starting your design, you must have a thorough understanding of Operations Manager 2007 security, including the required accounts and groups and the permissions they need. It is critically important to your design process that you understand roles and role-based security as implemented in Operations Manager 2007, as well as the implications of mandatory mutual authentication. For a complete primer on Operations Manager 2007 Security, see the Operations Manager 2007 Security Guide at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=64017.
Operations Manager 2007 takes a model-based approach to monitoring. In model-based management, all items that participate in providing a function or service in your organization are represented as models. For more information on model-based management, see the Operations Manager 2007 Key Concepts guide at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124799.
About This Guide
This guide consists of sections that step you through the design and testing process for your Operations Manager 2007 implementation. This guide will help you understand the building-block-level components in Operations Manager 2007 by presenting summaries of these roles. It will help you to ask the right questions to make sure your design meets your company's needs. It will make sure that you have answered the most fundamental design questions to ensure your design is flexible and scalable. It will help you plan and size your Operations Manager 2007 topology using data from the Performance and Sizing Guide. It provides guidance on how to validate your design in the lab.
After you have completed working through this guide, you will have a detailed infrastructure diagram and planned configuration of Operations Manager 2007 components. You will have validated these blueprints in a lab setting, and you will be ready to start your pilot deployment in production. When you reach this point, the next guide to use is the Operations Manager 2007 Deployment Guide.
Please note that this guide is intended to do just as its name says, to guide you. The decisions that you make and the design you come to in the end must ultimately be based on your needs. The guide helps make sure that you have all the information you need to make the best decisions for your particular situation.
Understanding the Operations Manager 2007 Design Process
Designing an Operations Manager implementation is really the process of achieving the following:
Understanding the features and functions that Operations Manager 2007 provides.
Understanding your company's business and technical requirements, the current infrastructure, and your current monitoring procedures.
Mapping those requirements to an Operations Manager 2007 infrastructure that will meet them.
Validating the Operations Manager 2007 infrastructure design in a lab setting.
During this process, you will have to perform sizing and capacity planning for your Management Groups; the data for this is included in this guide