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Microsoft this week at its Microsoft Management Summit will try to demonstrate concrete progress toward the broad goals it set out for its Dynamic Systems Initiative.
Microsofts message to attendees this year will be managing complexity to achieve agility, according to Felicity McGourty, director of the Windows Enterprise Management Division in Redmond, Wash.
“We want to get IT to a state where they can be responsive to business needs,” she said.
Toward that end, Microsoft will detail whats coming for the next major releases of its two mainstay management products, Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager.
Microsoft last year at the Summit said that SMS Version 4 would bring integration with Vista and desired-state configuration management, and that MOM Version 3 would add service-oriented monitoring and probability cause analysis.
With desired-state configuration management, Microsoft has already created a Solution Accelerator for SMS 2003 that monitors systems for any variations from a modeled desired-state configuration.
That SMS Desired Configuration Monitoring Solution Accelerator was added as a part of the Microsoft Operation Framework, which provides prescriptive guidance on how to solve specific problems according to methodologies in the IT Infrastructure Library.
A second Solution Accelerator, Exchange for SLAs (service-level agreements), provides a scorecard that shows how Exchange is performing as a service, according to McGourty.
Microsoft will also provide a sneak peek into its investments in virtualization.
“Well detail how we look at it as a multilevel problem—the virtualization of infrastructure resources up to the application layer,” said McGourty.
Microsoft will also flesh out its Systems Center product umbrella, which initially comprised SMS and MOM. Microsoft over the last year added System Center Data Protection Manager for file server backup, System Center Capacity Planner for Exchange and System Center Reporting Manager, which is in beta testing now.
In addition, Microsoft will update attendees on its progress on WS Management standards efforts and on its partner ecosystem initiative around DSI.