I am pleased to announce the that the WS-Management/SMASH Device Discovery Template for System Center 2012 (Operations Manager) is live and available to customers in the download center .
This template enables customers to scan for their WS-Management and SMASH capable devices and select those that they want to manage out of band, namely directly to the hardware’s Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). This enables hardware management of devices regardless of whether the machine is booted up into Windows or even has an operating system installed .
A key differentiator of this hardware management solution is that it provides a unified view from the hardware details up to the top of the application stack . With this solution, the health state determined from the BMC will roll up to the Windows Computer so that IT can see the hardware issues in context of the server. Here is an example of this on a server running the sample hardware MP. This shows how the health of hardware components such as CPUs and memory DIMMs are measured out-of-band and roll up to the Windows Computer health:
Some of the key features of the template and Management Pack include:
- Roll-up of health the hardware device to the Windows Computer object
- Diagnostic tasks to ping devices (ICMP ping and winrm ping)
- Support for both simple (username/password) and Windows domain credentials
- Support for Operations Manager resource pools
- Support for standard winrm configuration parameters
- Creation of new Run As accounts from within the template wizard
- Out of the box state views
- Diagnostic eventing to aid troubleshooting device discovery issues