Microsoft unveils its cloud management bundle

It was expected that Microsoft would unveil it’s cloud management bundle (System Center 2012) details yesterday and that is exactly what they did into two editions: Standard and Datacentre.  It had been rumored that Microsoft would take this move rather than sell individual products. 

The announcements from Microsoft positioned System Center 2012 as a public and private cloud management platform with a number of new additions to the bundle.

There will be two System Center 2012 SKUs: Standard and Datacenter. Each includes the same group of eight point products, but with only two “operating system environments” (OSEs) supported for Standard, and an unlimited number supported for Datacenter. (OSEs can be physical and/or virtual machines).

Microsoft didn’t officially name a RTM date for the final version of System Center, but it is expected that this will be announced sometime in April.

So what is in the System Center 2012 bundle?  Those in italics are new additions for 2012.

• App Controller – This is a new addition to System Center and provides a single management portal showing both public and private cloud resources providing administrators with a single view of their private and public cloud resources.
• EndPoint Protection: The security client formerly known as Forefront EndPoint Protection is now part of System Center and is integrated with Configuration Manager.
• Orchestrator (Was Opalis): Adds workflow automation and third-party integration with the 2012 release.
• Virtual Machine Manager: The 2012 release can now manage even more hypervisors from not just Microsoft, but also additional third parties.  Microsoft have also got the market pretty excited over the last year around server application virtualisation and this is the edition that supports that vision.
• Configuration Manager: Has more valuable features such as settings management with remediation and also provides integration with System Center Endpoint Protection.
• Service Manager: Adds more self-service management capabilities and new data warehousing and reporting features.
• Operations Manager: There is more support for Unix/Linux management functionality, customisable dashboards and more app-performance management and network monitoring.
• Data Protection Manager: New in this release is new role-based administration and item-level recovery for VMs which is a big requirement for virtualisation administrators.

So all in all some long awaited functionality and yet more additional value added by Microsoft and should help you make the move to a private cloud and any subsequent public cloud simpler.