Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 - It really, really killed our CPU
I’ve been spending some time mucking around with the new edition of MOM, now and forever branded by the Microsoft marketing machine as “Systems Center Operations Manager”.
Systems Center Operations Manager, or Ops Manager for short, has gone RTM and an evaluation edition is available for download. I figured I’d check it out and deploy it to our new internal infrastructure. It looks really good - a lot of stuff that was reasonably rough in MOM 2005 has been refined. I’m really loving the console, and the ease of configuration.
The only problem was that it totally killed our servers.
After importing the included set of management packs (and the Citrix Presentation Server MP) and rolling out the client, Ops Manager must run some kind of inventory process, because it spiked all of our server’s CPU utilisation to 100% for a good 15 minutes. After that, it cooled down a bit, until it periodically spiked them again, and it seemed to do it to all servers simultaneously. We run our servers on VMware ESX Server, so all of them hitting 100% CPU simultaneously is a real issue. After a day or two we ripped the Operations Manager agents out and, lo-and-behold, the CPU utilisation returned to normal.
I haven’t had a huge amount of time to look into the cause or a resolution. We are running our servers on brand new hardware, where the average CPU utilisation across the VMware ESX hosts is around 10 - 25%, so it’s not caused by hardware limitations. I’ll post again when I know what the cause is.