SCOM 2012 HA OPTIONS
SCOM 2012 WITH SERVER 2012 R2 & SQL 2012 SP1

As a full time System Center consultant I am often asked about deploying products in the System Center suite in a multi-site global deployment.  The application that comes up top of the list is SCOM. Companies want to monitor data centers across the globe with SCOM deployments that are 100% Highly Available (HA).  Once we look at multi-site SCOM deployments we are going to naturally incur additional costs and complexity.  In this guide we will look at a diagram that looks at the components and shows the flow between each component.  We will then examine each configuration, looking at the pros and cons. 

Deploying SCOM with the differeNt Ha options

So in this section, we are going to walk through the different options for installing SCOM in a multi-site environment and what considerations you may need to take into account in designing and implementing your SQL Server or servers.  SCOM is a great product in the System Center suite to discuss because a lot of companies require multi-site monitoring and want to have the ability to have a HA SCOM whereby if they lose a primary data center they want monitoring to failover to a secondary datacenter or DR site.

We are going to start off with the most basic SCOM deployment and work our way up from there. If you are a seasoned SCOM pro please excuse the basic nature of this, but it will be helpful for others to understand what it’s all building on.

Just in case some of the common abbreviations are not familiar to you

MG      Management Group, the security realm between the MS and the SQL DB

MS      Management Server, the server that has a writable connection to the SQL DB

DB       Data Base, the SCOM, monitoring and reporting databases that are hosted by SQL

GW      Gateway, the SCOM, role that is used in remote locations to forward to a MS

MP      Management Pack, XML document that holds discoveries, rules, monitors and reports

SQL Licensing Licensing is always a complex issue with System Center, and it doesn’t get easier with SQL, that being said I have been told from several sources that the no cost for SQL standard also applies for clustered instances of SQL standard only being used to house System Center DB’s. It was also confirmed to the MVP group that you can deploy SharePoint where it’s only purpose if to house System Center dashboards and there is no licensing requirement

Firstly we need a management server and a SQL Server to host the SCOM DB. A server we want to monitor, has a SCOM agent loaded on it, and it sends its monitoring data to the management server and the management server in turns writes that data to data bases on a SQL Server.  If we deploy SQL standard and it is only running to support System Center then there is no cost for the SQL license.