Announcing the Availability of System Center 2012 CTP2 – Service Manager

[System-Center-Team]

First published on TECHNET on Jun 15, 2012

This was another adrenaline filled week. A great TechEd 2012 in Orlando (see the keynote here) followed by System Center 2012 winning the best product award (thanks to all of you, we are humbled) and lastly being able to share the exciting new features that we have packed in System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2.. Yup… Vijay just blogged about it here !

Chargeback

As you all know, Chargeback is an important component in managing your fabric and your business. We in System Center recognize that and have invested in delivering Chargeback capabilities out of the box. This framework is extensible and allows one to consume the chargeback data in their normal business process.

The theme for CTP2 is Cloud pricing. IT admins will be able to configure pricing policies by creating Price Sheets in Service Manager Console and associate the Price Sheet to one or many VMM Clouds.  Service Manager discovers all the Virtual Machines in the associated clouds and computes the cost based on the pricing information in the price sheet. The processed information is stored in Service Manager Data Warehouse and is available for subsequent reporting. Below are some screen shots from the product…

To help everyone get introduced to Chargeback features in Service Manager, we have prepared a short introductory video .

To accelerate the ability for our customers to be able to provide feedback, we plan on making VHDs available. In addition to that, I plan to blog about a “data simulation” tool that you can run on the VHDs to generate the reports and share it with your team.

I would strongly encourage you to give this feature a spin and provide feedback make SP1 better. All you TAP customers – I am looking forward to seeing you in the Airlift..

Reminders:

• CTP1 cannot be upgraded to CTP2 and CTP2 will not be upgradable to Beta.
• CTP2 is not supported for production use.
• Procedures not covered in the documentation might not work.

• Evaluation VHDs will be available around the end of the month.
• Data simulation tool to generate Reports will be made available shortly.

Download:

Location	Description
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254659	The entire installation of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2. Select Service Manager download link (SC2012_SP1_CTP2_SM.exe) for the Chargeback solution, built on top of Service Manager
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254803	Documentation for all the components.

-Srikanth