Authors: Chris Amaris, Tyson Kopczynski, Alec Minty, Rand Morimoto
Publisher: SAMS Pearson Education (www.informit.com/sams)
Published: April 2010
ISBN 13: 978-0-672-33319-4
ISBN 10: 0-672-33319-8
Format: Soft cover, 1056 pages (plus free access to online edition of the book for 45 days)
Prices: $53.99
Leveraging System Center In Your Organization
"Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite" is a collection of technologies that have been designed to assist IT professionals manage their organizations' servers, client systems, and applications in the most efficient and proactive ways possible. But coming to terms with System Center, and obtaining a thorough knowledge of how it works and what can be achieved with it, is not a trivial task. In order to do so more quickly, I recommend that you grab a copy of "Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed." This book provides a logical pathway as it wends it way through the different components that comprise System Center. In addition, the book can also help IT professionals understand what is involved in the licensing arrangements of the System Center product and to pick the optimum combination for their particular organization System Center can be purchased as a series of individual units, or alternatively, as a suite made up of a number of components bundled together. And because the licensing arrangements are open to change at any time, the book also provides the Web address of the site that contains the latest licensing details, including the details of any price discounts that may be currently available.
In the opening pages of their book, "Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed", its four authors, Chris Amaris, Tyson Kopczynski, Alec Minty, and Rand Morimoto readily acknowledge that "like with many families or suites of products, the first rendition of the suite is nothing more than a bunch of disparate products bundled together under a common brand name, but really have no integration in working together. System Center was no different with the first couple of years of the product line being nothing more than name and branding." But the authors then offer their latest opinion that "today, however three to four years and two to three versions later the System Center products actually do work better together and an IT organization can leverage information in the various System Center components more easily and for a common benefit."
The "Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed" book contains at least one chapter devoted to each of the different System Center technologies, which are as follows (a brief description of the technology is also provided):
System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 that was previously known as Systems Management Server (SMS). IT administrators use SCCM to control a host of activities associated with their organizations' servers and client systems. Note: because this is such an important technology within a System Center environment, four entire chapters of the book are devoted to it.
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007: a technology that provides both monitoring and alerting on an organization's servers and client systems. The book's authors point out that "rather than waiting for users to alert the help desk that a server is down, SCOM proactively monitors systems and provides alerts before systems fail, plus it logs error events and system issues to help organizations address system problems usually before they occur."
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010: a versatile backup and recovery technology applicable to file systems, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint Server, and SQL.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008: interestingly, the book's authors reveal that "in the past couple of years, virtualization has gone from something that was only done in test labs to data centers that are now fully virtualized enabling organizations to have more than one server session running on a physical server system, and sometimes upward of 10 or 20 server sessions running on a single system."
System Center Service Manager (SCSM) 2010: the book's authors have been personally involved in the development of SCSM from its inception, and they describe it as a "help desk/incident management/asset life-cycle management/change management product." They believe that because "SCSM brings together the information gathering, reporting, alerting, and knowledge-base information in the other System Center products into a single product that [it] will help organizations better manage their IT infrastructures."
System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP): a technology designed for use by IT architects and designers so that they can more accurately determine systems' capacities within their organizations' unique operating environments.
System Center Mobile Device Manager (MDM): given the ever increasing use of different sorts of mobile devices in most organizations today, a technology, like MDM, is needed, as the book's authors correctly state, "to asset track, remotely secure, patch and update, and support mobile devices in the enterprise."
System Center Essentials for midsized organizations: see below for details.
When the authors of "Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed" wrote their book, they wanted to produce a text that was more than just a dry, run-of-the-mill manual. In their own words, the goal was a book that covered "real-world experiences with the System Center products, not like a 'product guide' simply with step-by-step installation and feature configurations, but with real-world notes, tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned in the design, planning, implementation, migration, administration, management, and support of the System Center technologies based on years of early adopter and enterprise production deployments." The four authors' diverse experience in the IT industry, coupled with the length of time spent working and consulting in it collectively, more than a staggering 70 years in total has seen them deliver on their goal for the book.
I would recommend that potential readers of this particular book tackle it in the following manner. First read both the introduction to the book and then its first chapter. The introduction provides a brief but useful breakdown of the sorts of information covered in the 19 chapters that make up the book. The opening chapter then introduces the System Center Enterprise Suite and provides a comprehensive review of each of its different technologies (as listed above), along with information about the ins and outs of System Center licensing. Next, I suggest that you read chapters two through five inclusive, all of which discuss different aspects of the System Center Configuration Manager, such as:
the design and planning involved with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2;
Configuration Manager implementation and administration;
using Configuration Manager to distribute software, updates, and operating systems;
Configuration Manager asset management and reporting.
Having successfully completed the reading of these parts of the book, readers can then skip to the specific chapter (or chapters of the book) devoted to the various System Center technologies that are of immediate interest to them. For example, four chapters discuss Operations Manager, covering everything from design and planning its implementation through to using it for monitoring, alerting, and security reporting, while another couple of chapters are dedicated to Data Protection Manager and how to use it to safeguard file systems, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint. And so on.
The final chapter of the book, however, deserves a special mention as it covers the System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) product. The book's authors explain that SCE is "an all-in-one version of the product intended for organizations with fewer than 500 users and 50 servers. Rather than buying and implementing SCCM, SCOM, and VMM as separate individual products for a small or medium enterprise, SCE allows an organization to take advantage of the key components of the full-blown System Center products, but with much better ease as SCE leverages wizards, auto configuration components, and other features to simplify the management tasks of a smaller enterprise."
In summing up, the impact that the combined System Center technologies are now having in the marketplace cannot be ignored. In fact, the authors of "Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed" report that "in 2009, the System Center products crossed that magical $1-billion mark in revenues for Microsoft that signifies a product line has 'made it' among the mass of products churned out of Redmond, Washington, every year." To familiarize yourself with the System Center technologies, I encourage you to read the first chapter of the book that has been reviewed here (the content is available online, free of charge, on the site of the book's publisher). By doing so, you will quickly gain knowledge of the entire System Center family of products. The bonus is that you will also get an immediate feel for the book's written style and the manner in which it introduces and discusses the different System Center technologies.