Thursday, November 29, 2018

SCOM - New Version Agnostic Naming Convention for Microsoft Management Packs

Microsoft today announced a change for the naming convention of future SCOM management packs.


In the past, when you wanted a management pack for a specific operating system or application version, you would search for something like 'Windows Server Operating System 2008 Management Pack' or 'DNS Server 2016'.

Going forward, all new Microsoft management packs will follow a new version-agnostic naming convention whereby the name will detail the minimum supported version and higher (plus) versions.

For example, the Windows OS MP will be named like - "Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Windows Server Operating System 2016 and 1709 Plus".

This change is required due to the new licensing options people have for Windows Server and System Center where the same management pack has to support two very similar and current versions of the same workload (e.g. Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 1901).

You can see these new version-agnostic naming conventions already in place for some of the more common Microsoft management packs listed on the SCOM MP Wiki here.

If we look on the SCOM MP Wiki site for the DHCP Server Management Pack, we can see that the older 2008 R2 and 2012 versions are still there as separate downloads but the newest version is listed as "Windows Server DHCP 2016 and 1709 Plus".


This new naming convention isn't exactly a show-stopper that you need to consider when deploying or managing your SCOM environments but it should hopefully help you quickly identify the the most current supported workloads that management packs can monitor.

You can read the full post from Microsoft on this topic here.