New System Center 2012 Helps Deploy, Manage Customer’s Public, Private Cloud

The new System Center 2012, announced at Microsoft Management Summit, will enable your IT managers and your customers’ IT Managers build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today — including other vendors’ platforms and virtualization technologies.

ISVs are using Microsoft virtualization to deploy server applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Your customers use Microsoft virtualization to deploy and manage your custom Line of Business (LOB) applications.

IT Pros are looking for service level agreements for you applications, including speed of deployment, troubleshooting and overall visibility. Ultimately, they are looking to ensure that their apps reliably do what they are intended to do for employees and customers. System Center addresses those issues.

One new component of System Center 2010, code name “Concero,” empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage applications on private and public cloud infrastructure.

Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager 2012 betas are now available. See System Center Free Trial to try out the beta.

Features

The new System Center 2012 capabilities announced offer a range of new features that significantly improve what the 2007 products provide.  

Enhanced capabilities for datacenter and cloud management:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 allows IT managers to pool and dynamically allocate virtualized datacenter resources (including Hyper-V, VMware and now Xen hypervisors) and Azure resources into clouds for various business groups to use in a self-service model.  It includes new standardized service modeling and configuration, and image based management – meaning IT can use it to manage business application services, not just virtual machines.
• System Center Operations Manager 2012 will fully integrate technology from the AVIcode acquisition for monitoring and deep insights into .NET and J2EE applications for maximum availability and performance.  It also adds new dash-boarding for better SLA tracking and network performance monitoring
• System Center Service Manager 2012 will enable self-service requests from datacenter managers, business unit IT managers, developers and end users, e.g. a developer can more efficiently request cloud resources
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 offers new, enterprise-class centralized backup and protection and increased depth of support for Hyper-V and workloads like SharePoint, and de-duplication support. 

As well as a number of new capabilities around data center and cloud management

• System Center Project  codename “Concero” empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure, while allowing IT managers to maintain visibility and control across both
• System Center Orchestrator (formerly Opalis) provides an IT process automation platform that orchestrates workflows across systems and tasks. This enables customers lower their costs while improving datacenter service reliability and predictability.
• System Center Advisor (formerly codenamed Microsoft Codename Atlanta) is a secure cloud service that assesses server configuration to enable IT professionals to proactively avoid configuration problems. A release candidate of this technology is available today at www.microsoft.com/systemcenter.

Enhancing Hyper-V

System Center 2012 solutions will enhance the current Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud programs and offerings for private cloud computing, including the ability to best manage virtualized workloads.

New findings from the Enterprise Strategy Group on the enterprise readiness and performance of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V for best-in-class virtualization of Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, see Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Summary on Hyper-V R2 SP1 Application Workload Performance.

About Virtual Machine Manager

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.

Get System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta.

About System Center Configuration Manager

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 helps you empower your employees to use the devices and applications they need to be productive, while maintaining corporate compliance and control. In today’s workplace, the boundaries between work and life have blurred. People expect consistent access to corporate services from wherever they are, on any device they’re using—including desktops, laptops, smart phones, and slates.

For more information, see System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2.

More Information about Virtualization

Using this core component of Microsoft private cloud solutions, IT managers can efficiently standardize infrastructure and application services for fast deployment of your applications.

See:

• System Center 2012 Beta
• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Solutions
• Microsoft Private Cloud

For more information on how you can virtualize your SQL Server workloads and test environments, see:

• High Performance SQL Server Workloads on Hyper-V
• Planning, Implementing, and Supporting SQL Server Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration

Keynote from Microsoft Management Summit

See Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson’s keynote:

Target Uses Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center for Business Critical Workloads

Target Corp. announced that it is now running business-critical workloads for all its retail stores on 15,000 virtual machines using Microsoft virtualization and management technologies, giving its IT department greater agility and economies of scale. The second-largest discount retailer in the U.S., Target has virtualized inventory, point-of-sale, supply-chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

For more information, see Customer Spotlight: Target Virtualizes With Microsoft.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation