DSI at MMS

It's Microsoft's Management Summit this week in San Diego, CA. A big theme of the week is Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). DSI is a 10 year vision to enable systems to be self deploying, self adapting, self monitoring and generally look after themselves.

How is this done? Do you employee an army of highly skilled consultants? No. You embed all the knowledge needed to deploy and operate systems into models, which can be consumed by software to enable those dynamic self-* operations.

4 years into the 10 year "plan", we've already broken ground with SDM and SML, and are starting to deliver products that use models to enable monitoring and systems configuration.

What does DSI enable?

Well imagine your made a model with your application. The model described what the application dependencies were, how the application should be installed, what the configuration and dependencies were and how to monitor the applications "health" and "performance".

Suppose this application needed to be deployed. If your application contains the knowledge about its dependencies, that part of the model could be consumed by Systems Configuration Manager to find servers that met those requirements. If the knowledge about how your application needed to be installed was in the model, if could be deployed too, configured and monitored. With knowledge of the applications performance over time, it should be possible to perform capacity planning calculations and predict when bottlenecks will occur.

Sounds far fetched? Not really a lot of what i talked about is possible today if you do-it-yourself. What DSI does is do-it-for-you, or at least it provides the tools, OSes and management tools that enable it.

2007 is going to be an exciting year for DSI and Building Manageable Applications. Watch this space...

You can view some videos about DSI from MMS here https://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/about/summit.aspx