I started of talking to Jalasoft. They produce extensions for OpsMgr 2007 to monitor things like network devices and other OS’s and applications. My interest was in Cisco network devices. License is around $100 per device. There is a Jalasoft console purely for configuring connectivity to the monitored devices and identifying what ports to monitor and what rules to enable. All monitoring activity and reporting is done in the OpsMgr console. Looks nice.
I moved on to Ask The Experts: Hyper-V. I raised my AV issue which raised some eyebrows – they want to swap some emails on the issue. I also raised NIC teaming. MS is working on fixing that. No timetables.
Then on to HP. I brought up HP’s Network Configuration Utility NIC teaming for Hyper-V. It’s the #1 issue for their internal S/W development right now. They are working with MS on resolving the issue. They admitted poor communications with the public. There will be announcements in a few weeks time. It will be an industry solution rather than a HP solution.
I then talked to Beyond Trust (t-shirt!). They provide a solution where no one needs to be an admin. You use GPO to define tasks that require admin rights. Anytime their agent sees this running, the task is elevated as an admin but still runs as the user. All logging shows the user doing the work. GPO is per user and per machine. Using loopback you can get into some nice scenarios for controlling admin usage.