Resource Pools in Operations Manager 2012

Q: What are Resource Pools in System Center Operations Manager 2012?

A: System Center Operations Manager 2012 removes the Root Management Server (RMS)  role, which was previously used for certain types of monitoring where no agent was available on the monitored resource such as a Linux server, network device or web site/application.

Using the RMS was problematic as it could n't be load balanced and wasn't made highly available easily without using clustering or a manual promotion of a non RMS server. Resource Pools in Operations Manager 2012 solves this problem by allowing multiple management servers to be grouped together for the purpose of availability and distribution of workload for certain types of activities, most commonly:

Often, when configuring the above type of monitoring, you can select a specific management server or a resource pool. My advice is to always create the following resource pools in your environment and add some management servers to each pool (even if its just one management server).

This means if the environment grows in the future, you can just add more servers to the resource pool rather than having to reconfigure your monitoring. To create resource pools, do the following:

Your Resource Pools should look like the following. Notice there are also three built-in resource pools. However, its best to avoid the All Management Servers Resource Pool for our specific needs so we can assign certain management servers to different types of monitoring.