Overview of System Center Announcements during #MMS2011 #sysctr

During MMS2011 a lot of announcements were made concerning new System Center products releases and important changes. Herewith a summary of the announcements so far:

• System Center Advisor
• System Center Concero
• System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta-2
• System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta
• System Center Orchestrator
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta
• Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) Beta

System Center Advisor

System Center Advisor (formerly Microsoft codename Atlanta) is a cloud service that enables IT professionals to assess their server configuration and proactively avoid problems. With System Center Advisor, support staff is able to resolve issues faster by accessing current and historical configuration data, all with the security features that meet their needs. Additionally, System Center Advisor helps reduce downtime by providing suggestions for improvement, and notifying customers of key to their configuration.

System Center Concero

The Concero tool will allow customers to manage both on-premises Services running on Hyper-V hypervisor and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and off-premises Services running on Windows Azure and Windows Azure Appliances. Concero will be built on Silverlight, to enable an “access anywhere” experience, according to information on Microsoft’s Web site.

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta-2

The 2^nd release of Configuration Manager leverage more effective IT services by enabling secure and scalable software deployment, compliance settings management, and comprehensive asset management of servers, desktops, and mobile devices.

Selections of signification changes in Configuration Manager 2012 since Configuration Manager 2007 are:

• Database replication used for transferring data and merge changes made between site databases throughout and between sites in the hierarchy
• Client Health monitoring and auto-remediation
• Client settings can be configured per site, collection or object basis
• Flatten Site hierarchy
• Leveraging mobile device management Exchange Connector
• Built-in Migration Support features
• Embedded PowerShell support

For a complete overview what’s new in Configuration Manager 2012 Beta-2 click here. Configuration Manager 2012 Beta-2 is now available on Microsoft Connect website.

System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta

One of the major changes is the RMS role which lapsed into Operations Manager 2012. Another change is that Operations Manager 2012 is by default high available by using management server pools. Also is it provides out-of-the box support for network monitoring including contextual network mapping that the relationship between servers and network infrastructure is visualized.

Further improvements/features of the Operations Manager 2012 Beta release are:

• Support for Java EE Application Servers (WebSphere,WebLogic, JBOSS, Tomcat)
• Agility for commodity hardware
• Support for automatic device monitoring failover
• Network Monitoring (multi-vendor/protocol support, server to network dependency discovery)
• Holistic application monitoring
• Easy dashboards solution (including web console, ease customizations, delivered through management packs, SharePoint support)

System Center Orchestrator

Microsoft have announced (what most of us knew already!) Opalis will be renamed ‘Microsoft System Center Orchestrator’. Orchestrator provides turnkey processes and workflows for complex data center management tasks across different environments and includes deep integration capabilities to orchestrate tasks for the server infrastructure and management processes, including those from BMC, CA, IBM, HP, Microsoft and Symantec.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta

System Center 2012 cloud and datacenter management solutions empower you with a common management toolset for your private and public cloud applications and services. System Center helps you confidently deliver IT as a Service for your business. Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 Beta is a key component of the forthcoming System Center 2012 releases.

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 enables you to:

• Deliver flexible and cost-effective Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). You can pool and dynamically allocate virtualized datacenter resources (compute, network, and storage) enabling self-service infrastructure experience for your business, with flexible role-based delegation and access control.
• Apply cloud principles to provisioning and servicing your datacenter applications with techniques like service modeling, service configuration, and image-based management. You can also state-separate your applications and services from the underlying infrastructure using server application virtualization. This results in a “service-centric” approach to management where you manage the application or service lifecycle and not just datacenter infrastructure or virtual machines.
• Optimize your existing investments by managing multi-hypervisor environments such as Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and VMware vSphere 4.1 in a single pane of glass.
• Dynamic optimization of your datacenter resources based on workload demands, while ensuring reliable service delivery with features like high availability.
• Best-of-breed virtualization-management for Microsoft workloads like Exchange and SharePoint.

SCVMM 2012 Beta is available on TechNet Evaluation Center

Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) Beta

BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) is a BitLocker management solution that will enable IT to more easily deploy and manage BitLocker volume encryption technology across the enterprise. Using MBAM:

• IT can automate the process of encrypting volumes on client machines across enterprise

• Helpdesk can reduce the time required for BitLocker PIN and Recovery Key information
• Security officers can quickly produce reliable evidence that indicates the compliance state of individual computers or even the enterprise itself.
• Security Officers can easily audit access to Recover Key information.
• Windows Enterprise users are empowered to continue working anywhere knowing their corporate data is protected.

The beta of Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring can be download here.

Final, we can conclude that MMS2011 incredibly much news to offer! Finally, I conclude with the announcement that Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 moves from E-cal to Core CAL.