What is new in System Center 2012 R2

Configuration Manager R2

  • Deploy and manage Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Configure and deploy WiFi profiles, VPN configurations and certificates
  • Maintenance windows exclusively for updates
  • UI improvements for filtering and automation update deployment rule management
  • Optimizes content distribution, providing clearer summary messages, and offering new distribution point usage data
  • Reports to help with infrastructure planning and troubleshooting
  • Make virtual hard drive (VHD) management easier by enabling the creation, modification and offline servicing of VHDs
  • More information here

Data Protection Manager R2

  • Back up DPM data in System Center 2012 R2 to Windows Azure Backup
  • SQL Server Cluster Support - DPM now supports the use of clustered SQL Server node
  • Virtualized deployment - DPM can be deployed in a virtual environment.
  • Linux virtual machine backup provides support for the protection and backup of Linux virtual machines, in addition to the support already provided for Hyper-V virtual machines
  • More Information here

Virtual Machine Manager

  • Site-to-site network connections using private IP address
  • Simplified guest IP management
  • Site-to-site NVGRE gateway
  • Enhancements to connectivity options of virtual machines networks to enable most tenant scenarios
  • Live Cloning of virtual machines: Support for a new Hyper-V feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
  • Enhanced support for Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Memory Features.
  • Ability to create Windows and Linux-based virtual machines and multi-VM Services, from a gallery of templates.
  • More information here

Orchestrator

  • Support for Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Install Service Management Automation web service and up to three (3) Runbook workers
  • Use as part of the Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server configuration
  • Enable use of Runbooks and perform other automation tasks using Windows PowerShell cmdlets
  • Integration Pack for Microsoft SharePoint
  • More information here

Operations Manager R2

  • The Fabric Health Dashboard shows a detailed overview of the health of your private clouds and the fabric that services those clouds
  • Microsoft Monitoring Agent is a new version of Operations Manager Agent that includes full functionality of Visual Studio IntelliTrace Collector for gathering full application profiling traces
  • Synchronize OM alerts and Team Foundation Server (TFS) work items
  • Support for taking IPv6 addresses as input for Network Discovery and display IPv6 addresses in the network-related views
  • Support for monitoring Java applications\
  • More information here

Other Resources

  • Server and Cloud Platform here
  • Configuration Manager here
  • Windows Azure Pack (WAP) here
  • Cloud OS here
  • News here
  • Note: Service Manager R2 is compatible with Windows Server R2, and will have feature parity with the latest hotfix rollup of SM SP1