Announcement: System Center 2022 is here!

Microsoft

Apr 01, 2022

We are happy to announce the general availability of System center 2022. It is a big step forward for System Center products that have been the management tool of choice for enterprise customers worldwide. On-premises customers have been associated with Microsoft for a long time be it for Windows Server, SQL Server or other deployments. Customers have relied on System Center to meet their management needs for their data centers comprising of multiple Hyper-V hosts and spread over multiple geographical locations. With System center 2022, we simplify management of IT estates, comprising of on-premises datacenters and public clouds. We provide flexibility for customers to evolve the environments as per their business needs, without needing to fragment the management stack or moving away from your existing System Center investments.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the exciting new aspects of System Center 2022. System Center 2022 provides the best-in-class datacenter operations helping customers stay in control of their IT estates across different environments and platforms.

Improved collaboration and Insights

Customers can leverage richer insights and deeper collaboration across their organization with exciting new features like enhanced access control capabilities, Microsoft Teams integration and easier management of alert closures in System center operations manager (SCOM). In SCOM, user roles help customers assign permissions for access to monitoring data and perform various actions. User roles are applied to groups of users and are scoped to a group of monitored objects. Various personas that use SCOM such as Infra team, SRE team, LOB app team and SCOM admins need to work in collaboration with each other to keep the infrastructure and applications up and running. With the advent of DevOps, boundaries between the different personas are shrinking where, for example, a developer does a lot of these operations today. With SCOM 2022, we introduce a new built-in role “Read-only Administrator” that provides all the read permissions in Operations Manager including reporting. Creating a custom user role is now simpler with “Delegated Administrator” as the base profile and adding a category of permissions such as Agent management, Account management, Notification management, Operator permissions and Reporting permissions.

“New Read-only Administrator/Delegated Administrator roles are very useful. I have waited a long time for an option to close a monitor based alert without manually opening the Health explorer app. Huge thanks for this new feature!” -Panu Saukko, ProTrainIT

Microsoft Teams is the platform of choice for massive number of customers for their collaboration needs. Organizations interact with each other on MS Teams, and users spend an ever-increasing time on Teams. SCOM 2022 would support sending notifications to MS Teams, replacing Skype for business notifications. Furthermore, with SCOM 2022, admin users can opt to choose the alert closure of a Health Monitor, that is in an unhealthy state, helping reduce the overhead between the application owners and SCOM administrators.

“Sort option in Overrides summary: Great feature I was waiting for.” Mario Battistella, GVCgroup

Enhanced Server Management Experience

System center 2022 also gives augmented server management capabilities by providing SDN in Virtual Machine Manager 2022. Customers can now assign IPv4 & IPv6 address to SDN managed VMs. Also included is improved online backup and item level restore for file/folder workloads in Data Protection Manager (DPM). DPM 2022 now uses iSCSI-based approach for item level restore by default. This improves the backup time for online backups & restore experience for individual items. Additionally, DPM 2022 allows you to securely backup and restore data to recovery services vault with the support for private endpoints.

Management of heterogenous infrastructure

System Center 2022 provides superior management of heterogenous infrastructure helping customers unify management across diverse workloads. System Center is the best management tool to manage Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server infrastructure. Virtual Machine Manager 2022 (VMM) can be used to manage Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2016 hosts as well. VMM also adds support for Windows 11 & Windows Server 2022 as guest Operating System. Also included is support for SCOM 2022 installation on Windows Server 2022 and monitoring workloads running on Windows Server 2022.

“Great experience with VMM 2022 preview build to manage WS2022 hosts in lab.

Looking forward to upgrade the production environment soon” – Olympia

“Great to see VMM supports WS2022, WS2019 & WS2016 host fabric!

Looking forward to VMM 2022” -Entain

In addition to comprehensive management experience for Windows Server 2022 workloads this release adds support to managing Azure Stack HCI 21H2. Azure Stack HCI, is the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) operating system that runs on on-premises clusters with virtualized workloads. Customers can effectively manage Azure Stack HCI clusters with the ability to add, deploy and manage them in VMM 2022. The experience of managing Azure Stack clusters in VMM is like that of managing Windows Server clusters, making it easier for you to adopt HCI without changing any of your internal processes. SCOM also now supports the Azure stack HCI management pack that focuses on the capabilities to monitor Azure stack HCI scenarios for Hyper-V , Storage Spaces Direct ,Software Defined Networks and Failover clusters for Azure stack HCI customers. We understand that our customers have a diverse environment in terms of running workloads on Windows and on Linux. Linux monitoring is one of the core focus areas for us and we are committed to making it better for enterprises of all sizes. SCOM now supports Ubuntu 20, Oracle Linux 8, Debian 10, and Debian 11.

Lastly a small peek into some exciting upcoming initiatives in the System Center suite of products. We understand it is common for System Center customers to also be adopting cloud. A common expectation is for them to be able to standardize management and governance across on-prem and cloud environments. They want to leverage the cloud services for management and governance of their entire fleet. We are aware of these asks and are working to provide System Center functionality for a hybrid environment while reusing your existing investments in System center. Stay tuned for more!

Here is how you can get started with System Center 2022: