Distributed Deployment of Operations Manager

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager

The distributed management group installation will form the foundation of 99 percent of Operations Manager deployments. It allows for the distribution of features and services across multiple servers to allow for scalability. It can include all Operations Manager server roles and supports the monitoring of devices across trust boundaries through the use of the gateway server.

The following diagram presents one possible option for the distributed management group topology.

Distributed Management Group

Note

There is no direct communication between an operations console and the databases. All communication goes to the resource pool through TCP 5724, and then to the database servers using OLE DB on TCP 1433 or another customized port a customer establishes. However, there is direct communication between an Application Diagnostics console (residing with a web console) and databases.

System Center 2012 - Operations Manager Features

This configuration supports all System Center 2012 – Operations Manager and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager features:

  • Monitoring and alerting, targeted for up to 15,000 agents

  • Monitoring across trust boundaries

  • Reporting

  • Audit collection

  • Agentless exception management

  • Agent failover between management servers

  • Gateway failover between management servers

  • Clustering high availability for database roles

Operations Manager Servers

This configuration supports all Operations Manager server roles:

  • Audit Collection Services (ACS) collector

  • ACS database

  • ACS forwarder (on agent-managed devices)

  • Gateway server

  • Management server

  • Operational database

  • Operations console

  • For System Center 2012 – Operations Manager: SQL Server 2008 R2, or SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Reporting database

  • For System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager: SQL Server SQL 2008 R2 SP1, SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 SP1 Reporting database

  • Reporting data warehouse database

  • Web console server

Restrictions

Single management group configurations do not support partitioning. Partitioning is the separation of management group services across multiple management groups. In Operations Manager, you may want to create multiple management groups for the following reasons.

Installed Languages

Operations Manager management groups support only one installed language. If the overall IT environment that you need to monitor has more than one installed language, a separate management group will be needed per language.

Consolidated Views

Even the largest distributed management group implementation will not be appropriate in every instance. This will lead you to implement multiple management groups, which will split your monitoring and alerting data between management groups. To provide a single, consolidated view of your environment, data from multiple management groups can be consolidated and viewed in another management group. For more information, see Connecting Management Groups in Operations Manager.

Function

You may need to have separate groups as needed according to function, such as preproduction for testing management packs and new servers, and production for monitoring daily business processes.

Administrative or Other Business Needs

Your company may have other administrative, security, or business needs that require complete separation of monitoring data and administrative teams, which will mandate additional management groups.

Common Uses

Distributed management groups are most commonly used to monitor very large preproduction environments and large production environments that

  • Span trust boundaries between domains and workgroups.

  • Have multiple network environments segmented by firewalls.

  • Have a need for high availability.

  • Must have a scalable monitoring solution.

Ports Used

This configuration supports full distribution of features among servers in the management group as well as monitoring of devices across network boundaries, resulting in a longer list of ports that need to be available for communications. For more information, see Connecting Management Groups in Operations Manager.

Distributed Deployment

You deploy either System Center 2012 – Operations Manager or System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager in a distributed management group when you want to allow for scalability and high availability of your management servers and gateway servers. By default, all management servers are members of the All Management Servers Resource Pool, which balances the monitoring load of your management group as new management servers are added, and provides automatic failover for monitoring.

A distributed management group distributes the various features of Operations Manager across several servers. For example, you can install the operational database on one server, the web console on a second server, and the Reporting server on a separate server. This differs from the single-server management group installation, where all features are installed on one server. For more information, see Single-Server Deployment of Operations Manager.

You can install a web console on a stand-alone server or on an existing management server, but you cannot install the management server feature on a server that has an existing web console. If you want to install the management server and web console on the same server, you must either install both features simultaneously, or install the management server before you install the web console.

This section of the Deployment Guide contains the following topics: