Customer Reviews

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed: With a Preview of Operations Manager 2007

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This is the book that bridges the gaps between product documentation, how the product works and how to use the product in a real world deployment.

As an avid MOM administrator, this is one of the rare books that is like having an experienced consultant with you to answer questions. MOM can be a complicated tool. Often people will be frustrated with attempting to deploy and manage using MOM. I highly recommend reading this book prior to deployment. The $60.00 price tag is nothing when compared to the hours you will spend tuning and attempting to understand MOM without it.

The complexity of Microsoft Operations Manager is attested to by the sheer bulk of this book. Some readers must surely wonder why any text on any computer program can be so hefty? But to a large extent, MOM's complexity is a consequence of the complexity of systems administration of the Microsoft operating systems and the ancillary packages deployed on top of these, like SQL Server and Exchange. At tremendous effort, Microsoft has built up an entire ecosystem of packages and operating systems. And there are many books devoted to each component.

But MOM's remit is to offer an integrated top level, and yet fine-grained approach, to managing the entire offering. Typically, the reader of this book will be a sysadmin of one, and in fact usually several, corporate computers. If you just have a personal computer running a Microsoft operating system, you are unlikely to need MOM.

Readers from a unix background might recognise an analogy between MOM and IBM's SMIT. The latter was a GUI tool that ran on AIX (IBM's version of unix), and greatly eased the managing of the often intricate AIX commands. But SMIT only really dealt with running the operating system. MOM also offers control of those above-mentioned sundry packages atop the operating system. So MOM is far more complicated.

A quick measure of MOM's complexity is given in Chapter 14. Where MOM's intelligence is embedded in its rule sets. With the default rule set having over 5000 rules, that pertain to what is recommended (or not) for the platforms and applications. Strewth! Happy reading. :)

Great book. Really goes into detail. If you've read Essential Microsoft Operations Manager, you'll certainly be pleased with how this book expands on these concepts.