* Management products for managing Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange, in all its versions, is no walk in the park to deploy.
The latest iteration, Exchange 2003, utilizes routing master, mail-transfer-agent, SMTP, Web partition, Outlook Web Access and other server setups. It requires an extension of the Active Directory schema. It interfaces natively with Internet Security and Acceleration Server and not so natively with dozens of other applications utilizing SMTP or MAPI services. There are numerous server services installed, various mail queues to be concerned about, performance characteristics relevant to Exchange, and, of course, dozens of different events transpiring in the course of even one Exchange operation.
Because of the complicated infrastructure that Exchange demands, Microsoft offers an entire certification around Exchange messaging.
So it is no surprise Enterprise Management Associates is finding a strong interest by most of the top management players in developing sophisticated management tools for Exchange. Once deemed as not very important in the enterprise, it is safe to say that e-mail, of which Exchange is a giant stakeholder, ranks among the top four or five IT operations that absolutely must be available.
Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, a fairly new entry to the management world with a product now in its second generation, supports the notion of management snap-ins, called Management Packs (MP), to handle a variety of operations management scenarios. There is an MP for Exchange – one that as you might imagine is well able to manage virtually every facet of Exchange, tuned by Microsoft developers to garner deep management knowledge and to help operators deal quickly with problems.
But there are others that have been thoroughly thought out – deep-dive products that can report on the activity and health of Exchange. HP OpenView Operations for Windows (OVOW), for example, has a very eloquent Smart Plug-In (SPI) for Exchange, creating a topological visualization of the corporate Exchange farm and allowing operators to drill down in to the guts of Exchange toward the root causes of any issues.
Computer Associates has a product called Unicenter Management for Exchange (UME). This product provides rich management capabilities to operations managers and can act in stand-alone fashion or in harmony with other, equally mature Unicenter management products for a well-honed management environment. UME brings the same characteristics to its Exchange management capabilities as OVOW does: business process views and topological views, performance monitoring, alerting, health states, event notification and correlation, root-cause analysis and so forth.
Lots of niche players EMA has spoken with also understand the relevance of Exchange in a corporate environment. When corporate representatives are talking to EMA, they’re usually proud to point out that their products are entirely heterogeneous. They list a litany of supported platforms, databases and products. Exchange is always listed as one of the supported managed elements.
Those shops with Exchange Server, and there are many, can take heart knowing a bevy of well-crafted products at good price points are available. There is no longer a need to lose sleep at night because of the fear that people may not be able to access their e-mail in the morning.
So I’d like to hear from you about what you use to manage your Exchange environments and what you like you like about the Exchange management tools you are using. Please send me e-mail at mailto:bheldman@emausa.com with “Exchange” in the subject line, to share your thoughts.
