Microsoft’s New System Center 2012 – I’m Impressed

Microsoft’s made some significant changes to their System Center offering. I’ve had a chance to really look it over and I’m very impressed.

For those unfamiliar with System Center 2012, it’s a comprehensive IT infrastructure, virtualization and cloud management platform. It’s a unified management toolset for both your applications and services, and it allows you to gain more productivity out of your infrastructure, drive predictability out of your applications, and integrate with the Cloud the way you want to.

It’s important to note there are actually two different variants of System Center 2012. The Datacenter edition includes all of the server management features and capabilities and is geared towards organizations with virtualized environments and more sophisticated management requirements. The Standard edition provides an easy and economical option for managing non-virtualized and lightly virtualized environments.

System Center 2012 is made up of 9 different Components addressing 3 segments of your infrastructure – Application Management, Service Delivery and Automation, and Infrastructure Management. The major benefits consist of:

• Hybrid Cloud Management – One toolset for physical, virtual, private and public cloud management
• Deep Application Insight – deep monitoring and insight into applications and applications health
• Cost Effective Infrastructure – tight integration of your heterogeneous datacenter environments
• Excellent Economics – unified and simplified solution editions with clearer licensing and flexibility in features without incurring additional costs.

Any organization that that is building or operating a private cloud and virtualized datacenter would be smart to look into System Center 2012. You can use whatever functionality you want at the time, addition additional functionality as your requirements become more complex, and not have to worry about adding additional licenses and true-ups.

For more information check out https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/datacenter-management.aspx

Tim Krueger, PEI