One Tool to Rule Them All

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When it comes to your environment odds are you have a mix of physical and virtual machines.  And, in all likelihood moving forwards, a mix of hypervisors.  Which leaves you needing a tool to manage your physical environment, a tool to manage your VMWare environment say and a tool to manage your Hyper-V environment.

What you need is a tool to rule them all.  What you need is Microsoft System Center.

If it’s important to make implementing virtualisation easy, then making it easy to manage the environment is just as critical for saving time and money.  With System Center, you get a single solution for managing your entire IT lifecycle, from deployment and provisioning, to monitoring and back-up.  Equally important, you can manage both server and desktop resources, both virtual and physical assets, and both Microsoft and third-party hypervisors, all with the same platform.

Even disaster recovery capabilities are built into System Center, helping you improve productivity during unplanned downtime and minimize the financial impact of IT outages. Using the Hyper-V Snapshot feature, you can quickly capture the state of a running virtual machine so that it can be rapidly and easily restored to a previous state.

Another example of where virtualisation is integrated into the management platform with System Center is the ability to deploy both physical and virtual applications from the same console.

The kicker to all this is the licensing – through System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) you get:

  • Enterprise Server Management Licenses for:
    • System Center Operations Manager 2007,
    • System Center Configuration Manager 2007, and
    • System Center Data Protection Manager 2007
  • A product – System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
  • Use rights – the right to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments (OSEs) on a single physical server

Note: the scale-unrestricted version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 will only be available as part of SMSE, as will the rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments (OSEs) on a single physical server.

Gollum would be beside himself.