Designing for Operations
Microsoft recognizes that managing an IT operation consumes the largest part of the IT budget, and has committed to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT operations by providing the tools and guidance needed to improve the manageability of heterogeneous operating systems — including Windows Server — and the features and applications that run on them. The Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is a commitment from Microsoft and its partners to help IT departments capture and use knowledge to create more manageable systems and automate ongoing operations, which will result in reduced costs and more time for IT operations to focus on what is most important to the business. Microsoft has created this initiative to help build management tools that increase the productivity and effectiveness of IT professionals. This topic addresses the ways that management tools should be designed to fit into a total IT management infrastructure.
Enterprise Control of Client and Server Computers
The largest component of the cost of ownership is associated with help desk support of desktop and mobile users. Configurable options must be put into a place where they can be managed remotely so that a centrally located administrator can quickly make changes to all computers under IT control. For example, Group Policy can assign users and computers to organizational units that correspond to the user’s job function and security access privilege. Then, a group policy object (GPO) can be created for distribution to all of the users or computers assigned to that organizational unit. Microsoft and other third-party providers have extensive suites of products created specifically to manage software and policy for users and computers in an enterprise environment.
Health and Diagnosability—Reactive Troubleshooting
Management functionality for all features and applications must provide for recovery from failures caused by the IT environment as well as by malicious attacks and latent failures in the feature. Instrumentation and monitoring of the current state of the feature are key to getting a failed feature back into operation. By defining a health model that indicates the operational conditions of an application or service, the methods to detect those conditions, the potential root causes, and ultimately the diagnosis and recovery actions, we can provide administrators and operators with a higher level view of the system and enable them to proactively monitor to avoid down time and meet the service level agreements with their customers.
Administrative Objectives—Proactive Activities
Windows adds value for managing computer systems through its graphical user interface (GUI). To improve manageability, we also need to create a much easier way to automate day-to-day management — a rich set of command line interface (CLI) tools that covers all actions performed by the IT professional. This goal can be achieved through adapting activity-based administration.
Activity-based administration is a solutions approach to system administration that addresses the manageability issue outlined above. It describes administration of the feature or application in terms of *activities *— sequences of actions on objects — that accomplish a business objective that has direct value to the administrator or user. Activity-based administration makes it easier to define, enforce, and delegate responsibilities to different feature administrator roles and feature users.
After the administration objectives are identified, it is easy to ensure that all of those objectives are covered by the command line tools and scripting interfaces. Additionally, activity-based administration encourages consistency between the CLI and the GUI, which greatly improves the learning curve for administrators who want to use both interfaces.