Announcement: System Center 2025 is GA

Microsoft

Nov 07, 2024

System Center 2025 is now generally available! 🥳

This release marks the next milestone in our commitment towards best-in-class datacenter operations with System Center. It focuses on supporting modernization of infrastructure and enhancing security of the datacenters. System Center 2025 brings a host of new features and enhancements designed to help you manage your IT infrastructure more efficiently and securely.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the exciting new aspects of System Center 2025.

Heterogenous infrastructure management

By delivering System Center 2025 (SCVMM, SCDPM, SCOM, SCSM & SCO) concurrently with Windows Server 2025, you receive management at-scale for the latest Windows Server version right from Day 0, allowing you to plan upgrades and make the most out of new capabilities to optimize the infrastructure and virtualized software-defined datacenters.

Cognizant of your preference to manage heterogenous infrastructure with a single management plane, VMM 2025 supports management of VMs running on Azure Stack HCI 23H2 clusters and supports VMs running latest versions of Linux distros. The experience and scale for converting VMware VMs to Windows Server using VMM also gets an upgrade.

DPM 2025 integrates seamlessly with SharePoint Subscription Edition and provides virtual TPM (vTPM) support for VMware.

Embrace enhanced security

We continue to enhance security in System Center products to ensure all operations, storage & authentication mechanisms used are secure and reliable. In System Center 2025, we have reduced the dependency on CredSSP and NTLM as the authentication mechanisms. With the support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3, System Center products support the latest version of encryption technology, ensuring that all data transmissions are protected by the latest security standards.

All VMs created through VMM 2025 will default to Generation 2 which provides secure and faster booting. Recognizing the importance of safeguarding sensitive information, DPM 2025 introduces the capability to securely store passphrase in Azure Key Vault, significantly increasing data security by leveraging Azure’s robust cloud infrastructure.

Support for OLEDB 19 in DPM 2025 and SCO 2025 further underscores System Center's commitment to security. With the support of gMSA (Group Managed Service Accounts) in SCO 2025, you can reduce the administrative overhead of managing password synchronization between service accounts. Additionally, SCO 2025 supports the most secure and latest .NET8 (LTSC).

Support Infrastructure Modernization

As your datacenters evolve, so do our solutions. With the General Availability of Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM from November 2023, you can now use Azure Management services like Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, etc. to secure, govern, monitor and configure your SCVMM managed VMs through Azure Arc. You can also get the latest Arc enabled capabilities of Windows Server 2025 like Hotpatching for Arc-enabled SCVMM VMs right from Day 0. The end-of-life WS 2012/R2 VMs can continue to be in supported state with Extended Security Updates (ESUs) procured via Arc-enabled SCVMM.

Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM also gives the ability to perform power cycle operations such as start, stop, restart and lifecycle operations such as create, resize, scale and delete on your SCVMM managed VMs that are hosted in on-premises datacenters. All these activities are governed by Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC) enabling your teams to perform VM operations in a self-service fashion. This serves as an effective replacement to the end-of-life approaching Windows Azure Pack.

Lastly, we are discontinuing Azure Profiles feature of SCVMM and System Center Service Provider Foundation (SPF) as these capabilities are now being built into Arc-enabled SCVMM.

System Center 2025 is a comprehensive solution that provides the tools you need to manage your IT infrastructure effectively. We are excited to see how our customers will leverage these new capabilities to drive their digital transformation initiatives. We encourage you to explore the new features and enhancements in System Center 2025. For more information, visit our System Center Blog and join the conversation on the Microsoft Tech Community.

Here is how you can get started with System Center 2025: