Here were some of the week’s highlights for me personally:

I presented for the first time at MMS this year in a session on the Gateway Server Role in Operations Manager 2007. There were lots of questions after the session, as well as some requests for details on the order of operations in the Gateway demo, which will spark some additional blogging on Gateway bits that are as yet largely unknown.

My co-presenter, the brilliant Ian Jirka (pronounced Yerka) from the Opsgmr Product Team at MS, fell ill and was unable to present, but kindly still came to answer questions.

Introductions

I met some of my fellow Opsmgr enthusiasts from the community, including Derek Harkin, Scott Moss and Kevin Holman.

Partner Announcements

The really big announcements for the week were really the Cross-platform monitoring for Opsmgr and VMM 2008 beta, for which I’ve provided some details below.

The announcement I thought was most promising was the one by Solarwinds of the Orion Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Essentials 2007. The Orion Management Pack will be available at no charge and will connect SolarWinds’ Orion network management platform to Microsoft System Center products. I was beginning to wonder if they were going to provide an equivalent to the MOM 2005 version.

Ian Blyth put some details together on the partner announcements if you want to read through the list HERE.

Cross-platform Monitoring

Native cross-platform monitoring was announced officially at the Tuesday keynote. The following are the planned supported platforms:

• HP-UX 11i v3 PA-RISC
• HP-UX 11i v3 IA64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server
• Solaris 10 SPARC
• Solaris 10 x86 
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1

NOTE:  I think the underlying architecture is still NDA, but let me just say, you will be impressed - and I think *IX administrators will be too!

Follow events as they develop at the Opsmgr Cross-platform Team Blog.

Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has the same look and feel as the VMM 2007 but under the hood the are some significant changes, specifically the ability to manage not only Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V and VMware ESX.

If you’re not familiar with Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), which provides integration with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to address alerts from hardware, operating systems and applications allowing for dynamic rebalancing of virtual machine resources using knowledge-based policies and rules.

PRO leverages the Operations Manager framework. This makes Operations Manager 2007 a mission critical component of a heterogeneous environment for virtualization.

That’s all for now….more highlights a bit later.