Datacenters are complex with multiple components across compute, storage and networking – components that are used to store and manage the most critical resources, vital for continuous operations of an organization. These IT environments quickly grew out of control, along with the myriad of management tools and specialized resources needed to maintain them. Since its release in 2008, Microsoft System Center has provided leading-edge capabilities that deliver a simplified datacenter management experience to keep you in control – whether on-premises, in the cloud, or across platforms.
Today, we are excited to announce System Center 2022, the next release of our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), will be GA (General Availability) in the spring of 2022. This release includes enhancements that provide best-in-class datacenter operations, hybrid capabilities with Azure and flexible platform to manage infrastructure.
Over the years, organizations like Dell Technologies, Entain Group, Acuutech and Schaeffler have relied on System Center to simplify deployment, configuration, monitoring and management of their hybrid infrastructure. They partnered with us in this journey to make the products better and always aligned to customers’ needs across various segments. A big thank you to all the members of the System Center community and our customers and partners for your support and feedback that inspired the innovation we built into this release.
Best-in-class Datacenter Operations
Your IT environments are evolving with diverse types of applications often running on a diverse set of hardware across distributed locations. For all the workloads that run in the on-premises datacenters, System Center 2022 delivers richer insights and analytics with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), enhanced server management experience with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), data protection enhancements with Data Protection Manager (DPM) and reliability, performance, scale improvements to Orchestrator (SCORCH), Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Service Manager (SM).
As you adapt to a remote work or hybrid work environment, collaboration and security remain top of mind. With the increasing demand for real-time and synchronous collaboration scenarios in the workplace, we are bringing integration of Microsoft Teams to SCOM, enabling you to consume critical infrastructure monitoring alerts within your Teams channels, and provide ITOM compliant management of alerts. Additionally, flexible role-based access control provides granular control over SCOM permissions. You can now follow the principle of least privilege for SCOM users, have provide auditors with read only permissions, keep your production environments safe and reduce the administrative tasks at the same time.
We are also excited to add dual stack support in VMM that now lets you assign IPv4 & IPv6 address to SDN managed VMs.
Moreover, increasing size of the infrastructure and workloads has a ripple effect on the backup needs. DPM 2022 (Data Protection Manager) provides extended local storage limit up to 300 TB, meaning you can now backup more data using a single DPM Server. That’s not all – the backup and restores will be faster too with iSCSI-based approach for item level restore.
Flexible infrastructure platform
Data centers are becoming more heterogenous consisting of different host platforms & hypervisors, Windows/Linux, VMware, and Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI). In addition to a comprehensive management experience for Windows Server workloads, this release of System Center features support for Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and VMware 7.0 hosts. You can now provision, deploy, manage, monitor and backup VMs (Virtual Machines) on your Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSphere clusters with System Center 2022. In addition to the VMs, you can fully manage the Azure Stack HCI 21H2 clusters with VMM 2022. That includes addition, creation, registration of clusters, setup networking & SDN controllers, and management of storage pools, virtual disks etc. Not just that, restores of VMWare VMs with DPM would be faster with parallel restore of multiple machines.
Moreover, SCOM 2022 extends the supported Linux operating system versions to be lock step with the latest available in the ecosystem, Debian 10, Ubuntu 20, Oracle Linux 8 & SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.
Hybrid capabilities with Azure
Efficiently managing IT resources that are sprawled across various locations without slowing down developer innovation is a key challenge that IT leaders face today. Azure Arc enables you to seamlessly govern, manage, and secure Windows and Linux servers, Kubernetes clusters and applications across on-premises, multiple clouds, and the edge from a single control plane, the Azure portal. Today, we are announcing that new hybrid capabilities with System Center will be available in 2022. If you are an existing System Center customer, you will be able to manage your on-premises environments from Azure, reusing your existing process investments and management packs. You would also be able to manage costs using Azure cost management and get Hybrid use benefits for your System Center SA licenses. Stay tuned for more on these exciting capabilities.
Where do you start?
Thank you for being a valuable System Center customer – your passion and feedback has helped us shape this new release and we are excited for the journey ahead. For an early access to System Center 2022, sign up here.
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