Distributed management servers architecture

You are correct in regard to best practices. It is best practice to install the management pack only onto the RMS and not the secondary management servers. We actually follow 'best practices' and have been working closely with the Operations Manager team in order to provide the best performance out of our management pack software suite as well as the hardware it runs on. I will give you a run-down of how our management pack installs as well as how very different it is from a typical 3rd party management pack.

 

 

First of all, our installation package not only includes the management pack file (F5_ManagementPack.mp), but also a Windows service and a collection of libraries and modules which are used to communicate with the F5 devices (Big-IP, etc). The service is necessary because we use a custom protocol to communicate with our F5 devices, which Operations Manager does not currently support. This protocol is something written by F5 and extremely fast and lightweight compared to SNMP. We also have DataSource modules, which are loaded directly into the Operations Manager Health Service, and provides direct communication with the RMS and Operations Manager databases in most cases.

 

 

As far as installation is concerned, we only import the actual management pack file onto the RMS, which is why it is required that you install it there first. It is then required to install it onto the secondary management servers because our service and modules are required to actually discover and monitor our F5 devices. This provides the maximum throughput for health and statistics to be collected from the F5 devices.

 

 

Concerning scalability, we currently do not have fail-over support, but it is definitely in the road-map for our product. So unfortunately for now, you would have to rediscover the F5 device from another management server.

 

 

Lastly, the F5 devices don't show up in the device listings under the Operations Manager group because we have created our own group and sub-groups which help better organize our devices with other devices discovered on the network.

 

 

I hope this clarifies things a bit better for you. Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense.

 

 

Thanks,

 

-Dave