The OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool is an interactive Excel document designed to assist you with planning and sizing your deployments. As shown in Figure 1.2, you can choose from a number of different configuration scenarios and all you need to have is a rough idea of what it is that you actually need to monitor.

Figure 1.3: OpsMgr Sizing Helper Tool

This should be the go-to tool that you use prior to every OpsMgr deployment that you do. Although the information it feeds back to you is to be used purely as a guide, it goes a long way to ensure that your designs are aligned as close to best-practice recommendations as possible. You can download the tool from http://tinyurl.com/opsmgrsizing.

All OpsMgr features are fully supported by Microsoft to run in a virtual environment that meets the minimum requirements outlined in the OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool. Purely for performance reasons, Microsoft recommends running the OpsMgr SQL databases on physical disks rather than on virtual disks but this is only a recommendation and there is no issue if you want to deploy the databases in a virtual environment, assuming of course, that you have configured the underlying storage where your virtual disks are located according to best practice recommendations for SQL workloads.

You also have the option of running some or your entire OpsMgr environment on Microsoft Azure for the following three recommended scenarios:

If you're running OpsMgr 2012 R2, then the following versions of SQL Server are supported to host the databases:

If you're running OpsMgr 2016, then your SQL choice is slightly more limited:

The following operating systems are supported to run OpsMgr 2012 R2:

OpsMgr 2016 can be deployed on these operating systems:

If you deploy the OpsMgr 2012 R2 Web Console role, the following Internet Explorer and Silverlight versions are supported:

The OpsMgr 2016 Web Console has the following requirements:

In the following table, we can see the TCP port numbers and outgoing directions that the various OpsMgr features require. This information can be useful when configuring communication across firewalls in your organization.

Although the majority of firewall ports required for OpsMgr are TCP-based, the following table lists the UDP port numbers and the direction they should be enabled for:

If you need to deploy an OpsMgr 2012 R2 agent to your Windows estate for monitoring, then the following is a list of supported server and client operating systems:

For OpsMgr 2016 agents, the following Windows server and client operating systems are supported:

A wide range of cross-platform operating systems are supported and the following list details the versions you can monitor with both OpsMgr 2012 R2 and OpsMgr 2016: