Computerworld -
Microsoft released the final version of its System Center 2012 suite of components in April at a conference in Las Vegas. I've taken a hard look and used it in a variety of tests, and I find it a compelling product that has lost a lot of its licensing and complexity baggage. Let's drill down.
System Center's goal
The original idea behind System Center was to provide a product that delivered on three main tenets: to allow your infrastructure to become more productive and efficient, to make your applications and services more reliable and to bring the cloud into your on-premises systems.
With System Center 2012, Microsoft wants you to use what you already have in terms of hardware and software investment and simply wring more out of it in terms of efficiency, uptime and performance. It's not just about Windows, either: Microsoft collects massive amounts of usage data from its Customer Experience Improvement Program, which shows that nearly 20% of customers are monitoring Linux with System Center.
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Computerworld - Microsoft released the final version of its System Center 2012 suite of components in April at a conference in Las Vegas. I've taken a hard look and used it in a variety of tests, and I find it a compelling product that has lost a lot of its licensing and complexity baggage. Let's drill down.
System Center's goal
The original idea behind System Center was to provide a product that delivered on three main tenets: to allow your infrastructure to become more productive and efficient, to make your applications and services more reliable and to bring the cloud into your on-premises systems.
With System Center 2012, Microsoft wants you to use what you already have in terms of hardware and software investment and simply wring more out of it in terms of efficiency, uptime and performance. It's not just about Windows, either: Microsoft collects massive amounts of usage data from its Customer Experience Improvement Program, which shows that nearly 20% of customers are monitoring Linux with System Center.
System Center delivers tools and products that not only make the applications behind your business deliver predictable (and high) uptime, but also have excellent analytics for when things go wrong. With code that Microsoft acquired from AVIcode in 2010, System Center can now see deeply into applications. For example, an administrator can actually view the individual SQL calls that are taking the longest in an application -- an issue that directly impacts the performance experience for end users.
System Center 2012 was designed by Microsoft to bring the notion of public cloud services into private data centers.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Microsoft set out with System Center 2012 to bring the knowledge, experience and capabilities of cloud computing into the private data center so that you can use some of the same methodologies and features available in public cloud services right on premises -- and even combine management of the two with a single tool set.
There are a lot of moving parts to System Center. Briefly running down the entire suite's components, you have:
- App Controller, a new tool that integrates with other System Center components to give a single view of on-premises applications as well as the applications deployed via the Windows Azure cloud platform.
- Configuration Manager, basically the old Systems Management Server (SMS) product that has gotten much, much better and more flexible over time. There has not been a lot of work on this component in the 2012 edition, however.
- Data Protection Manager, a backup and restore product that now supports continuous data protection.
- Endpoint Protection, an enterprise-class anti-malware and protection engine that used to be sold under the Forefront brand name; there's nothing really new in this edition.
- Operations Manager, which now supports the discovery of routers, switches, network interfaces and ports (and monitoring them all, too) in addition to the other software- and application-based components that the product has historically found; it also monitors Web platform applications.
- Orchestrator, a new tool that lets you graphically design scripts called runbooks that direct services and applications, and the workflows that go along with them.
- Service Manager, a new user servicing and ticketing tool that helps organize support functions and provides a tracking mechanism for requested and assigned work.
- Virtual Machine Manager, which manages virtual machines for their entire lifecycle, from installation of templates in a library to automated deployments to migrations and monitoring.
There are two key pieces in System Center 2012 that I see as the glue that makes it all work together: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). That's not to say the rest of the components haven't been updated and freshened, but by far the most compelling additions in the System Center 2012 suite are VMM and SCOM and how they enable a better data center and private cloud environment.
Hands-on testing
I was able to test the release version of System Center 2012 in my lab and simulate the various tasks that, according to Microsoft, data center administrators interested in deploying private clouds would undertake. I also had the opportunity in January to test the release candidate edition of this software alongside Microsoft's engineers and support people, with them pointing out specific areas in which they thought admins would find particular interest.
I broke my testing out into three pieces: requesting private cloud components, creating clouds from bare metal, and provisioning and monitoring services. This three-part test happened both times I tested -- in January and again in April.
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