Editor’s Note: Fast-Forward Your Management Skills and Investments with System Center 2012
System Center 2012 will enable IT managers to deliver private cloud services that empower business teams, provide greater insights into application performance, and allow IT to carry forward current investments as they adopt public cloud computing.
By Mitch Irsfeld
Microsoft for some time now has explained that if you use System Center, you can use those same skills to monitor and manage applications in physical and virtual environments. And now you can test drive the newest versions of the System Center family that integrate and automate the management solutions to help you optimize your infrastructure to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
The TechNet Evaluation Center is now hosting eight System Center 2012 trials and in the current TechNet Feature package, we’ve included those eval offers and several helpful resources to get you up to speed on System Center for managing data center and private cloud infrastructures.
First, the trials. You can download all eight at once or select individual System Center 2012 products, including:
- System Center 2012 Configuration Manager RC
- System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection RC
- System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta
- System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 Beta
- System Center Orchestrator 2012 RC
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC
- System Center App Controller 2012 Beta
- System Center Service Manager 2012 Beta
There are host of Microsoft System Center 2012 Evaluation Resources to aid you in setting up and configuring your trials, as well as overview and community content.
And now you can also use System Center to monitor and manage applications on Windows Azure. Download the Deploying and Managing Windows Azure Applications Evaluation to get the Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack along with an evaluation guide, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 VHD, a Windows Azure-ready application to deploy, the Windows Azure Software Development Kit and Tools for Visual Studio, and the Windows Azure Platform Trial.
To understand how the new System Center family can facilitate self-service, process improvement and automation, read the TechNet Magazine article Keep an Eye on System Center 2012. Also from TechNet Magazine, Managing Mobile Devices with System Center takes a look at how System Center provides secure device management for smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Finally, we’ve called out some specific resources to assist your evaluation of the specific System Center 2012 products:
- Introducing Operations Manager 2012 Dashboards, which provide information on the enhancements in the ability to display data with the new dashboard capabilities in Operations Manager 2012
- Video: System Center Configuration Manager 2012 “How Do I?” offers short videos on specific tasks and show you how to accomplish them in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager
- TechNet Library: What’s New in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 lists some of the new tasks that can be performed in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012
- Video: A First Look at Data Protection Manager 2012 focuses on leveraging DPM’s protection and recovery capabilities for application workloads such as SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint, as well as virtual machines within Hyper-V
- System Center Service Manager 2012 Beta Deployment Guide helps you deploy Service Manager 2012 Beta in a many scenarios, form a simple one-computer set-up to a four-computer scenario designed to support product environments
See for yourself how System Center 2012 will enable you to deliver private cloud services that empower business teams, provide greater insights into application performance, and allow you to carry forward your current management investments.
Thanks for reading,
Mitch
Mitch Irsfeld*, Editor of TechNet, is a veteran computer industry journalist and content developer who managed editorial staffs at several leading publications, includingInformationWeek, InternetWeek andCommunicationsWeek. He is also an editor for* TechNet Magazine and managing editor of the TechNet Flash newsletter.