Service Manager incorporates architectural components of Operations Manager
In 2008, Microsoft announced a delay in the release of the product that would become Service Manager 2010. The product would be rewritten and aligned with the rest of System Center, utilizing technologies in use in the existing products and enhancing them to meet the requirements of Service Manager. (See https://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2008/02/07/system-center-service-manager-update.aspx for background).
What did that mean exactly? To improve performance and better integrate Service Manager with the rest of the System Center family, Microsoft was rewriting the product. And that rewriting would involve taking advantage of the architecture in another System Center product, in particular, Operations Manager 2007.
If you are familiar with the Operations Manager architecture and start looking at Service Manager, you may discover you have just enough existing knowledge to be dangerous.
- Service Manager has management groups and a data warehouse – although implemented a bit differently, as the data warehouse is installed in its own management group
- Service Manager uses the same Windows services as Operations Manager 2007 R2 – the System Center Data Access Service, System Center Management Service, and System Center Management Configuration Service
- Service Manager has management servers, and similar to Operations Manager, the first management server installed is a single point of failure
- The registry structure uses the existing registry structure for Operations Manager 2007 – HKEY_LOCAL_MachineSOFTWAREMicrosoftMicrosoft Operations Manager3.0
- Service Manger has management packs – although the schema was updated to meet requirements for Service Manager. Operations Manager management packs are referred to as version 1.0, while Service Manager management packs are version 1.1. These management packs can be sealed or unsealed, using .MP or .XML extensions, respectively.
It will be interesting to see how the two products continue to evolve using that common architecture, and how the architecture might be implemented in other System Center products.
