MMS 2006 - breakout sessions

Remote Management Capabilities in Windows Vista.

Bit of a mis-leading title.

The challenges here are: heterogeneous hardware & software, multiple protocols and security models, ports & firewall exceptions and packet filters.  Cross platform is very hard and expensive.

We're addressing the problem by going down the standards route.  WS-Management was ratified by the DMTF the other day.  It's got support from most of the big industry players (Intel, AMD, Sun, HP, Dell, etc) at both the hardware & software levels.  Big management ISVs are in too (BMC, CA, HP, Novell, etc).

Event aggregation, health monitoring & troubleshooting, collecting events from anywhere (we have a generic adapter that will collect WMI events from HW and convert them into WS-Management.  WS-Management will obviously work through firewalls.

In Vista, the components are: Windows Remote Managemet (WinRM), Windows Remote Shell (WinRS), an IPMI driver, and event collector and an event forwarder.  The Remote Shell will initially be CMD.exe but in the future will be the Windows PowerShell.

WS-Management will be natively in HW soon - that will enable you to remotely configure hardware and potentially perform out-of-band functions like watch a re-boot (all over http/https).

System Center Operations Manager 2007 will be able to consume events from agentless machines - just by configuring the event forwarder to send events to it.  Monitoring of workstations.

Had to leave this session early, so missed the wrap up (hence the 'not so structured' notes).

More later - Dave.