MS Beta Software To Manage Unix/Linux Systems

Tumbleweed writes "The Cross Platform and Interop team at Microsoft today announced some new beta products for managing Unix/Linux systems from MS Operations Manager 2007, as well as connectors for HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. Both betas are available at Microsoft Connect (search for systemcenter), according the blog."

"Resistance is futile..."

[BUL2294 (1081735)]

"You will disarm your command prompts and escort us into Linux as root. If you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you."

Re:"Resistance is futile..."

[ClickOnThis (137803)]

"You will disarm your command prompts and escort us into Linux as root. If you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you."

I think MS would like to destroy Linux whether anyone "intervenes" or not.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I do wonder whether this is another "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactic. Or at least an attempt by MS to create a "view" of Linux that it can control, perhaps in a way that is unflattering to Linux.

Nope. MSFT needs some Wall St. Cred STAT!

[mikelieman (35628)]

So they're going to pretend to be competent enough to play in the "Enterprise Management" arena. Like they pretend to be competent enough to play in every arena they've entered...

Sometimes it works better than others. Now? Not so much... I see MSFT is down today, and going down further in after hours.

RHT and GOOG are up, however.

Re:

[Culture20 (968837)]

Indeed; I wonder how many times this app will randomly send a "kill -9 1"

April Fools Joke

[Bananatree3 (872975)]

Imagine this playing over [youtube.com] Microsoft's recruitment center PA on April 1st.

We are the Borg...We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

Manage Unix/Linux Systems?

[apoc.famine (621563)]

Wtf? The gui tools available NATIVELY don't allow for any comprehensive management of Unix/Linux systems. Less is more, terminal is faster, text over ssh, bash scripting - the entire culture of *nix is anti-gui.

How the fuck is MS going to make a gui to manage such systems?

Or are they just reimplementing an ssh terminal?

Re:

[oyenstikker (536040)]

webmin.

Re:

[zappepcs (820751)]

Indeed... webmin can be quicker for stuff you can't remember the command line for, but it is ALWAYS best to learn the text/terminal/shell commands for the very same thing.

I like a lot of webmin, but would rather just script quite a bit of stuff where I can. Much simpler than clickety clicks -- YMMV

The REAL question is: Are there *ANY* *nix system admins out there that WANT MS to manage their systems? My head about exploded when I read the title. On second reading, well, it makes sense to be able to deal wi

Re:Manage Unix/Linux Systems?

[InlawBiker (1124825)]

Because then, theoretically, you don't have to have both Linux and Windows people on staff. I.T. managers want to hire less people, not more, and the Windows guys are usually cheaper.

Re:

[PPH (736903)]

Command line or GUI, what Microsoft needs to do is to restrict the number of options available when administering Unix/Linux systems to the subset available for Windows. Then, the next question is: What can you do with *nix that you can't do with Windows (ignoring the crippled interface)? If the answer to that is: Nothing, then the next question is: Why not just use Windows?

Re:

[Venik (915777)]

For the past year I've been struggling with Scali Manage - a cluster management tool that came with our two new HPC SLES clusters from HP. Essentially, Scali is an attempt to create a parasite OS on top of Linux. Scali does offer a couple of useful features, but nothing that can't be done by hand almost as easily and nothing that's worth all the additional problems it creates. The moral of the story is: if there are idiots willing to pay big bucks for useless software, there always will be those ready to ta

Re:Manage Unix/Linux Systems?

[TheRealSlimShady (253441)]

It's an automated monitoring & alerting tool, rather than a GUI tool to perform actions that would traditionally be performed at the command line. So you just let your *nix system run, then when an error occurs (maybe an message gets logged in syslog, maybe a process that should be running isn't), the alerting system can alert you (email, SMS, IM), optionally take corrective action and resolve the issue automatically. You can also collect performance stats etc so you can do capacity planning and analysis. Screen shots here [techlog.org]

Is it just me...

[Infonaut (96956)]

Or does that Connect Center login look like a dating site?

Better late than never

[discogravy (455376)]

I hope they find a way to tie tools like these together with their existing tools for windows; something like a built-in mremote [mremote.org], even if not freeware/OSS like mremote (although the mremote author today posted that he's going to be moving to a for-pay model and away from GPL).

Keep away

[Wowsers (1151731)]

I dual boot Linux and Windows, the less Windows knows about Linux on the system all the better, especially when you consider Windows wants to do stuff like on re-installing Windows, install it's boot loader over the better Linux one. Who knows what Windows would do to file permissions.

Hmmmmm.

[jd (1658)]

I see you are trying to manage Linux. Do you want help installing Vista instead?

• Yes
• No, I'll install Vista myself now
• killall clippy

we really promise to play nice this time...

[harvey the nerd (582806)]

Uh, no thanks. We work too hard to avoid defective products, extortion, and sources of malware for anymore chances. Please extend, embrace and extinguish yourselves.

Microsoft Linux

[calebt3 (1098475)]

So they are building a GUI to manage Linux servers. Could this eventually lead to a MS Linux distribution? (of course one that masks the cli and possibly has it's own proprietary clones of all the 'standard' programs)

Re:

[Deanalator (806515)]

I believe you are referring to SUSE. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I think microsoft is actually trying hard to make sure you can easily run a linux server farm in a windows datacenter.

I think that this is why microsoft has been hiring up so many xen/suse people. From their hires and acquisitions, you can tell that microsoft is investing a TON into the virtualization market.

Re:

[jcr (53032)]

MS washed their hands of Xenix a long time ago. They sold its rotting corpse to SCO.

-jcr

Ha, I'm doing just the opposite

[rwa2 (4391)]

A lot of my work these days deals with getting Windows boxes to act more like *NIX boxes so I can operate them remotely from a central Linux box.

It's working out pretty well, actually... I set up cygwin with sshd installed in interactive mode, so I can run a script on the central server and have a cluster of WinXP machines all open an application simultaneously, such as play a video simultaneously or connect to a set of VNC servers all at once. I can also use rsync to efficiently distribute and keep a set of files up to date.

Still running into a bunch of limitations of what I can do remotely, such as set the display mode to a certain resolution, etc. so it ultimately won't keep me from replacing the remote machines with a bunch of custom Knoppix LiveCDs eventually. But at least this way I can still leverage the other Windows sysadmins we have an abundance of.

Interesting implications

[bcmm (768152)]

It almost seems as if they have just noticed that there is nothing they can do about Linux's domination of the server world, or the decline of the desktop, and have decided that Windows can be the the frontend/thin client.

Ignorance is bliss

[thethibs (882667)]

Does anyone here have even a faint idea of what Operations Manager is? Judging from the posts so far, the answer is obviously "Not a clue".

It's not a remote shell.

"Infringing the GPL?!" LOL!

Re:

[thethibs (882667)]

Come to think of it, I think it deserves a full-blown ROTFLOL!

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

An attempt to put an MS label on non MS boxes.

This may be a good thing in the long run

[mlts (1038732)]

Devil's advocate here:

Long term, this might be a help for Linux and other UNIX variants. A lot of companies are required, either due to regulations, contract or their own corporate policies to perform audits on computer systems. Having a "one stop shop" by MS where someone can punch a button and generate a report on vital machine statistics for every single thing hooked up to the corporate network, down to the USB powered urinals, regardless of OS being run, will allow IT shops more freedom in choosing operating systems.

Having OS independence for this tool would allow a shop to use Linux for a number of servers, but when audit time comes around, it will be as easy to print out a report about the machine's and how it adheres to corporate policy as the Windows machines. Audits of machine and network infrastructure security are a critical part of a lot of businesses and any tool that allows this to be made easier is definitely a help.

Using a tool like this, a business can not just say to a prospective client that "all our network connected computers have antivirus, antispyware, and firewall software installed that are kept updated", but actually show it, by showing a report that even the Solaris boxes have Mcafee installed [1] with current vdef files.

[1]: Yes, we all know about UNIX boxes and viruses, but there are lots of times when virus scanning software has to be present on all machines due to contract or legal reasons, even if the installed program just takes up space in /usr/local and the only thing it does is fire up a cron job to update the virus definitions and occasionally run a filesystem scan.

Re:

[thethibs (882667)]

Listen to the man—he knows whereof he speaks.

Microsoft didn't just dream this up. Their customers, including a few of my clients, have been asking for this. A lot of non-trivial data centres run a mix of platforms—LAMP for Web, Windows Server for file services and AD, something else for databases,... They want to manage all this with a single management environment and toolkit.

Microsoft is doing what it does best. It's responding to a well-defined customer need.

Re:

[Kent Recal (714863)]

Admittedly I have only glimpsed at TFA. But what the hell does "manage" mean in this context?
Last time I checked our hosts ran a mixed set of services, most of which are best (and most comfortably) "managed" from the command line - by editing config files.

What is MS gonna do, create a GUI frontend for every piece of OSS unix software out there?
Preferably a unified one?

Excuse me while I go laugh my ass off.

It's called Tivoli -- And it's by IBM.

[mikelieman (35628)]

And when your data center grows up to be big and strong, you can buy it too.

Re:

[grcumb (781340)]

...USB powered urinals....

Man you give a whole new meaning to the phrase 'hot plug'.

One Command

[KwKSilver (857599)]

My guess is that they will only support one command, e.g., dummy@dodo:~# rm -rf

8-(

From Microsoft

[Ariastis (797888)]

"Please use our BETA software to manage your stable servers. kthnxbai"

Awesome!

[Vexorian (959249)]

You do not need windows anymore to get locked into Microsoft!

OH BOY !!!

[unity100 (970058)]

their software cant manage their own systems thoroughly. now its gonna manage linux ? oh boy oh boy oh boy !! hot jupiters !

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

Well, this system has the advantage of managing non-MS systems.

Bite the Bullet

[VeteranNoob (1160115)]

Why doesn't Microsoft just bite the bullet and base the next version of Windows on Linux or BSD?

We could finally see a secure and maintainable version of Windows. And Linux might finally see its adoption on the desktop like it has always sought.

It is obvious that Windows has become stagnant. Adoption seems to be nil, or possibly even negative. When ordinary (read: non-geek) acquaintances go out of their way to trash Vista, you know it's in trouble. And I don't believe their code-base is the issue, e

some more information

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Yahoo News [yahoo.com]
Microsoft leverages two community projects promoting open protocols for network management-- Web Services for Management and OpenPegasus-- to enable cross-platform support. Microsoft also has joined the steering committee for the OpenPegasus project and will contribute royalty-free code to the project

some articles via Google News [google.com]

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog [technet.com]

Information Week [informationweek.com]

Microsoft won't just rip the code from OpenPegasus, but will join IBM, HP and others on the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the project under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License, which the Free Software Foundation has said is compatible with the GNU GPL version 3. The terms of the Microsoft Public License mean that any code Microsoft contributes will be freely modifiable and usable by anyone, so long as copyrights in the code are left intact.

"It's very important to me that we use OSI-approved licenses when using open source," Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of platform strategy and one of its top open source advocates, said in an interview.

Microsoft's adoption of OpenPegasus for the Operations Manager add-in could be seen as a small data point that shows Microsoft is getting a little bit more comfortable with the open source world by working with IBM and others on an open source project. It's not like Microsoft is open sourcing all of System Center, but it is a step nonetheless.

Re:

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Crap. Take off the trailing 'J' from the Yahoo article for that one to work. *sigh*

IBM Called

[bhmit1 (2270)]

They're pulling support [ibm.com] for the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). You're supposed to be developing for Omnibus [ibm.com] now.

yet another virus vector

[fred fleenblat (463628)]

So when my windows box gets pwned, the botmaster can just wait for root access next time I uses MOM and then he gets my linux cluster too? No thanks.

Say what?

[thatskinnyguy (1129515)]

For a second there I thought I misparsed the title as "Fox guards hen house".

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

But seriously, who wants to be managing something with a GUI under Windows, when you could be SSHing in and changing all the settings.

Yeah, that's why all those cpanel and webmin products are so unpopular. Oh wait... they are extremely popular. Hmmm... maybe people do want this.

I know I do... I like to be able to ssh and change all the settings. But I also like being able to flip a checkbox on a form when I just need to change one setting, or even better, delegate flipping that setting to somebody much less

Re:Chose Wisely

[Mr. Sketch (111112)]

But seriously, who wants to be managing something with a GUI under Windows

A Windows user?

Re:

[houstonbofh (602064)]

Many people. Have you ever used MOM or something like it? There are no FOSS products that can give an overview and easy management of a hundred or so Linux systems like MOM, or BMC, or CA or Tivoli can do with Windows. Attitudes like your are why FOSS is so far behind. Many people want an easy way to manage 100 desktops before they deploy 100 desktops. And while Microsoft makes some crappy products, they are always easy. Microsoft could own this market very fast, and that should scare you. The fact i

Re:

[Kent Recal (714863)]

Many people who want to deploy "100 desktops" (or rather "100 servers" in this context) will first want to hire competent staff to manage said hosts.
For OSS unix-management stuff I'd point to puppet, cfengine, FAI (debian specific) and others. As usual there is not "one tool to rule them all" but a set of building blocks that competent staff will assemble into something suitable to the task.

Re:

[isj (453011)]

IMHO, A mix of GUI+command-line works best. I use Yast for the initial setup, and the command-line for tweaking. I wouldn't dream of setting up network cards initially via the command-line. I guess that it depends on whether the GUI simplifies a task without being too limited. Examples:
Adding network cards: Yast manages udev detection, persistent interface naming, and ip/mask. Command-line would be too cumbersome.
Adding NFS mount: command-line wins here (1 line in /etc/fstab)
Adding software: yast is OK. Yum

Re:

[whoever57 (658626)]

Configuring init.d: GUI runlevel management is easier than making symbolic links myself.

But a command-line tool such as chkconfig or rc-update is easier than either a GUI or making the symbolic links yourself. In fact, Red Hat's system-config-* tools are very effective.

Re:

[ancientt (569920)]

Well, for those of us using MS management tools, this may (potentially) provide a nice consolidation of the tools we use. If I could get a plug-in that would consolidate the updating processes and reporting, then yes, that would be handy.

Certainly I can do everything that I need to with the tools from each system, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings if it could all be done through one interface with the reports bundled into one system that works well with MS Severs that I already have to support. No argument

Re:

[plantman-the-womb-st (776722)]

Why exactly do you think that the casual home user is trying to manage a room full of servers?

Re:

[drakaan (688386)]

I can't speak to how easy MOM is to use, but (about a year ago), I gave nagios and Zennos a try, without much luck. Configuration was difficult enough that I didn't know where to look for what to try and reconfigure. I was looking for an open-source OpenView replacement. I may revisit them (and look at the other two), if they're working better now...