Understanding OpsMgr Deployment Scenarios

As previously mentioned, OpsMgr components can be divided across multiple servers to distribute load and ensure balanced functionality. This separation enables OpsMgr servers to come in four potential flavors, depending on the OpsMgr components held by these servers. The four OpsMgr server types are as follows:

• Operations Database Server—An Operations Database Server is simply a member server with SQL Server 2005 installed for the OpsMgr operations database. No other OpsMgr components are installed on this server. The SQL Server 2005 component can be installed with default options and with the system account used for authentication. Data in this database is kept for four days by default.

• Reporting Database Server—A Reporting Database Server is simply a member server with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Reporting Services installed. This database stores data collected through the monitoring rules for a much longer period than the operations database and is used for reporting and trend analysis. This database requires significantly more drive space than the operations database server. Data in this database is kept for 13 months by default.

• Management Server—A Management Server is the communication point for both management consoles and agents. Effectively, a management server does not have a database and is often used in large OpsMgr implementations that have a dedicated database server. Often, in these configurations, multiple management servers are used in a single management group to provide for scalability and to address multiple managed nodes.

• All-in-one server—An all-in-one server is effectively an OpsMgr server that holds all OpsMgr roles, including the databases. Subsequently, single-server OpsMgr configurations use one server for all OpsMgr operations.