First published on TECHNET on Dec 17, 2009
I’ve had people ask me many times over the last couple of years…. does Service Manager integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager? Can Service Manager help us manage our virtual assets? The answer is… Yes! Although we don’t have connectors out of the box that directly connect to Virtual Machine Manager there is still a lot that you can do to manage your virtualized infrastructure with Service Manager.
It all comes back to that common platform we’ve talked about. The Virtual Machine Manager team created a great management pack for Operations Manager. That MP discovers the entire virtualized infrastructure as a “distributed application”. It discovers all the VM hosts and the VMs running on them down to a very granular level of detail. It makes System Center aware of what is a virtual Windows computer. All of this information is
immediately
available in Service Manager by doing two simple things:
1) Import the SCVMM MPs into SCSM
2) Create a Configuration Item (CI) connector to SCOM using the wizard in the SCSM admin console
All of the configuration item data about your virtualized infrastructure will automatically start flowing from SCOM to the SCSM. The virtualization infrastructure “distributed application” from SCOM will become a Business Service in Service Manager. The service map will be populated with all of the discovered service component objects from SCOM. From there you can use this information to inform incident, problem, and change management. Work item records (incidents, change requests, and problems, etc.) can be related to these virtualization service components.
In this demonstration, I also wanted to show how easy it is to leverage the Service Manager platform, Windows Workflow Foundation, and PowerShell to extend Service Manage to mange and automate IT processes. In this case the demonstration shows how using PowerShell based console tasks the Service Manager user can remotely start/stop VMs. Next in the demo, I show how automated workflows built on Windows Workflow Foundation using PowerShell can automated portions of a change request process.
This entire demo was done without writing a single line of code!
Check out this demo and let us know what you think!
All of the materials used for this demo are also attached in case you want to take a closer look.
VMMDemo.zip
