When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation.  Sounds like science fiction?  Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route.  Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005.  Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops.  That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment.  That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day?  Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.

This was all thanks to the automation provided by Microsoft System Center.  It wasn’t even called that back then … or the term had just been coined.  We had SMS 2003 (now known as Configuration Manager 2007 R2).  That allowed us to audit systems, generate license deployment reports, measure software utilisation and deploy software automatically.  It could have done software deployment and patch deployment but those features were pretty crude prior to the current release of ConfigMgr.  Instead we used WSUS and Remote Installation Services (now replaced by Windows Deployment Services).  Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (now Operations Manager 2007 R2) gave us centralised monitoring of health and performance for our Windows Servers.  This included HP hardware, operating system, Microsoft applications/services and Citrix MetaFrame at the time.  Combined with Active Directory and a carefully designed GPO and delegation model, we had complete control of everything, always knowing what was happening and being able to proactively respond to issues in the network.  We had a frequently changing business so being able to respond quickly was essential.  We had that.

Source: http://joeelway.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!2095EAC3772C41DB!2500.entry