Server Management Suite

We use CMS to manage our desktops, and our server guys all agree that makes sense.  After all, the desktops are so similar!  But when it comes to servers, they say, "We wouldn't use Altiris SMS!  All of our servers are different, nothing is the same.  We patch Windows using WSUS."  (The server team manages servers without any automation or monitoring or scripts, except for WSUS, but they use manual installation and manual reboots.)

So I have a few questions:

• Is it fair or unfair to compare SMS to CMS?  Is SMS basically CMS for servers?
• Why use SMS in our environment if all servers really are different (100 servers, mix physical/VM, mix of OS with 60 Windows, rest ESX, Linux, Solaris, etc.)?
• What benefits did you receive by implementing SMS?
• I see a lot of threads regarding monitoring.  Is the primary benefit of SMS monitoring?  (As opposed to CMS, where the primary benefit is automation?)

Feel free to point me in any other directions that would help me understand how people use SMS.

Montioring and alerting functionality in SMS7 is fantastic.  Show a server admin the Real Time Monitor and tell him "It keeps this data for historical trending" and you might get a better reaction.

Inventory of the servers is very useful as well.

Finally patching is handy.  We have a script in Task Server 7 that lets server admins select multiple servers and trigger patch installs on them...it's both manual (they get to do a "Run Now") and automated (it determines the patches and executes them)

Our server guys use Patch, Inventory, and a bit of software delivery (we have several other monitoring tools implemented already).  As Jeff said, you don't have to use the out-of-the-box configuration.  In fact we have about 45 different patch policies applying to a similar number of collections (due to a limitation of Patch 6.x concerning time zones).  We don't have Task server implemented, or else we would probably have something similar to trigger the patch installation/reboot.

In V6, all of our servers are set to stage the patches to servers, but it's up to the server admin to go into each and click the "Begin Patch Update Cycle" on each server (so they maintain control)

In V7 we're configuring it the same way, but giving server admins the "Task" to allow them to do servers en masse...for example, we have one guy who does >200 servers every month, and logging in to click the button was starting to annoy the heck out of him.  with the Task, we don't need to manage dozens of different configurations for our local offices, we simply provide a tool for them to configure as they want to.