SCOM Trick 38 – Gateway

Using a SCOM gateway server (SCOM GW) can be very helpful. Mostly a reason to use a gateway is because you want to monitor a domain which has no Kerberos trust with the domain where your management servers are located. In this case you can just setup a certificate trust between the SCOM MS and the SCOM GW and have the gateway talk to the other agents in his domain. Of course there are some other advantages as well, such as compression of data between the gateway and the management server, you only need to open 1 firewall port for one server if you find the need to cross firewalls, you can have the gateway add a site name which you can use to separate agents and alerts coming from that location. I think Satya Vel had a very good post about the ten reasons to use a gateway at http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2008/02/19/10-reasons-to-use-a-gateway-server.aspx.
All information on how to setup a gateway is in the documentation as mentioned in trick 1.
Marnix Wolf has a very nice article on when to use a dedicated gateway server
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/04/scom-gateway-server-deployment.html
There is a nice article on how to use multiple gateways by Anders Bengtsson:
http://contoso.se/blog/?p=831
And yet another good article from Marnix about some of the advantages of a gateway:
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/10/opsmgr-gateway-servers-and-their.html

Back to the SCOM Tricks general list