The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a sort of blueprint that companies can use to standardize the way they manage their IT, pretty similar to what the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of practices does.
Virtualization is such a complex technology that involves OSes, networks and storage administration, security hardening, performance monitoring and even applications troubleshooting in some cases. As we said a long time ago, virtualization professionals are sort of super heroes.
There’s a real need for operational frameworks to handle virtual infrastructures but unfortunately nor ITIL neither MOF are currently covering this aspect of the IT governance.
A step in the right direction may come from Microsoft, which released the first beta of what they call Reliability Workbook for Hyper-V, as part of the existing MOF 4.0 framework.
The Reliability Workbooks are task lists (in Excel format) that Microsoft recommends to follow to monitor and maintain the health and reliability of their products.
Before using a Reliability Workbook a company has to fine tune it, performing a list of steps:
Once done, the customer can move on the spreadsheet, which includes 5 pages besides the Overview and Acknowledgements:
- Monitoring Activities
- Maintenance Activities
- Health Risks
- Standard Changes
Here’s the Health Risks table:
It is still really really basic and honestly, considering the available resources and experience built with four generations of MOF, Microsoft could do so much more than this, showing the authority in system administration that its marketing department use to sell against VMware.
It’s the first beta anyway. Hopefully customers will have something better for the RTM.