Book Review: Professional MOM 2005,
SMS and WSUS
by Pete Zerger, May 22, 2006
Authors: Randy Holloway, Telmo Sampaio, Marcus Oh, Russ Kaufmann, Derek Commingore
Availability: Currently available at most online retailers. For prices and availability, click HERE.
The realm of IT operations encompassing service monitoring, system imaging, configuration management, patch management (need I go on?) can be a daunting task for one administrator. So I was pleased to encounter a book offering practical guidance for running the gamut of Microsoft operations and systems management offerings for administrators who don’t make a living deploying and administering these technologies.
While the book is light in the design category, the authors do an excellent job of juxtaposing the three products, plainly illustrating how the tools fit together in an overall operations management strategy. If you’re looking for a treatise on the inner-workings of MOM and SMS, or in-depth enterprise design discourse, this is not the book for you. However, if you’re ready to get down to the business of installing and using SMS, MOM and WSUS in your environment, this is an easily digestible resource that accurately hits the key points of each product in a succinct fashion.
After offering a brief flyover of product concepts, this text wastes no time in delving into implementation step-by-step, guiding the reader through installation of first MOM, followed by SMS and finally WSUS. In fact, by the time you’ve navigated chapter 5, your base MOM 2005, SMS 2003 and WSUS are already in place. The format of the book is unique in that it is essentially a walkthrough of a parallel deployment of all three products, switching from one to the next at each phase of configuration.
MOM
Subsequent chapters (5-10) provide the “Cliff Notes” version of MOM management pack configuration, touching on the items that require manual configuration to achieve full functionality across a range of commonly deployed management packs. So if, for example, you don’t care to read a 100+ page guide to deploy the Exchange MP, then this is the right book for you. In my opinion, the authors did an excellent job of touching on the manual configuration items that are frequently the source of questions and confusion, such as those in the MBSA and Exchange Management Packs.
The books goes also on to touch on an oft-overlooked subject near to my heart –MOM alert tuning. Eliminating false-positive alerts is definitely where a MOM admin wins the battle for the hearts and minds of his operations team and this text touches on this process, as well as offering pointers to additional MOM reports and process documents on the topic.
Coverage of MOM agent function and deployment was very thorough, and covers MOM rule types in some detail, which is another common source of confusion for MOM experts-in-training.
Patch Management
I was also particularly impressed with the patch management discussion, which covers both WSUS and SMS functionality in this regard, and some of the key differences in the two technologies, which can be employed as complementary tools in a comprehensive patch management strategy. From this text, one could deploy WSUS with just a little outside help on getting group policies established.
SMS 2003
From a configuration perspective, this book offers a bit more on MOM than SMS, but SMS can fill a pretty large volume on its own, but this was a good beginning for the novice administrator. The SMS coverage focuses on the elements most desired by the target audience, including initial installation, agent deployment and functionality, patch management and reporting. Advanced functionality, such as application deployment and configuration management is left for another volume.
Chapters devoted to reporting and security round out this offering. The reporting section is particularly nice, illustrating both how to work with queries in SMS for custom reports as well as a walk through the creation of a custom report. The security section was somewhat brief, but it did at least touch on the concepts and best practices, which is much better than leaving these things unmentioned.
Overall, I see Professional MOM 2005, SMS 2003, and WSUS as a very useful deployment reference for administrators in the small to medium enterprise.