I have been a Systems Engineer in the past with quite a bit of virtualization experience. I’ve built MOM 2005 and SCOM environments in purely physical, all virtual and mixed environments, heck I have a traveling virtual lab I carry with me. Below are my recommendations and observations about running SCOM 2007 SP1 in large enterprise environments.

Almost everyone runs some kind of virtualization these days. Most applications (if not all) will run virtually, SCOM is no exception (with certain caveats of course). In your lab environments, or sandbox running SCOM virtually is ideal. You can build, delete and rebuild with almost no problems (SCOM problems anyway). I was recently running some SCOM clustering and migration tests. Almost 100% of my testing was being done virtually.

In Production is where you will need to take into consideration your architecture, environment, what MPs you will be running and how many agents you plan to monitor. While any SCOM server can be run virtually, the question is should you run them virtually? Below is a list of what I would recommend as virtual candidates (in any type or size or environment):

1.       Gateways – these servers are very efficient in the way they handle data. I have seen and built large enterprise class architectures with multiple GWs and seen how well these servers function under load. Of course with any server it’s going to depend how many agents you have reporting to them, but they are designed to compress and handle large amounts of data.

2.       Web Application Watchers – These servers are similar to web servers (albeit a little higher end server). They can be scaled out to handle them most complex loads. We have seen these servers handle hundreds of URLs (some were able to handle more, some handled less). Again the beauty of running these virtually, if you notice they are starting to get overloaded you can deploy another in fairly short order (depending on your virtual infrastructure).

3.       Management Servers – You have to be careful here. In my opinion, Management Servers can be a gray area. If you are in an environment with more than 150 agents and a lot of MPs I would NOT go virtual. However in smaller environments I think VMs would be OK. Another possibility could be to have your RMS physical and one virtual management server; however again you have to watch the number of agents you are running.

4.       Reporting Server – The Reporting server makes a great virtual candidate, if you are in an environment that calls for a separate reporting server.

5.       RMS server – Only if you are in an environment of less than 100 agents, very few concurrent consoles sessions and not really busy overall; else this server should always be physical. A very simple rule to follow… your RMS should almost always be physical.

Now obviously in large environments there is always a good mix of both physical and virtual servers. There is always room for some sort of virtualization in your SCOM infrastructure. I should also say that 75%-80% of my experience has been on VMWare ESX server 25-35 (and 3i). I have just started playing with Hyper-V and VMM, and should have a lab built solely on Hyper-V by the end of next week.