System Center 2012 CTP2 Now Available!

Couple things first.  Check out the TechEd 2012 Session on what’s coming in SC 2012 SP1:  https://northamerica.msteched.com/topic/details/2012/VIR201#fbid=ovh6LDyxJpE

Download SC 2012 SP1 CTP2 Here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30133

A few things to note about CTP2, this release contains updates to all the System Center components. See below for more information and stay tuned for additional posts describing the component updates.

Upgrade: CTP1 cannot be upgraded to CTP2 and CTP2 will not be upgradable to Beta.

Production Use: this release is not intended for production deployments, it’s targeted at giving you all an early preview of some of what’s coming in this SP1 release. And there is a lot that still has to come after CPT2!! We specifically focused on a key set of scenarios documented here for this release.

What’s New: All components now support Windows Server 2012 RC and SQL Server 2012.

Component

What’s New

App Controller

Ability to migrate a VM from VMM to Azure

Support for using Service Provider Foundation to create and operate VMs in VMM

· Azure IaaS enhancements: Ability to deploy VMs from an image or disk, start and stop VMs, and add VMs to a service

Data Protection Manager

· Improved backup performance of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V over CSV 2.0 deployments

· Protect Hyper-V over remote SMB share

· Protect Windows 8 de-duplicated volumes

· VM Live Migration: Uninterrupted data protection

Operations Manager

APM enhancements, including:

· Support for IIS8

· Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services

· Azure SDK support

Orchestrator & Service Provider Foundation

· Supports existing System Center and 3rd-Party Integration Packs

· Service Provider Foundation, which provides a rich set of web services that manage VMM: 

o Create, change, and operate VMs

o Manage VMM Self-service User Roles

o Manage multiple VMM stamps and aggregate results from multiple stamps

o Integration with App Controller to use hosted capacity

Service Manager

· Ability to apply price sheets to VMM Clouds

· Create VM chargeback reports

· Ability to pivot by Cost Center, VMM Clouds, and Price sheets

Server App-V

· Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during the packaging process

· Ability to create virtual application packages from applications installed natively on a remote server

Virtual Machine Manager

· Improved support for network virtualization

· Ability to convert VHD to VHDX and to use VHDX as a base operating system image

· Support for the Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units, and discovery of SAS storage

· You can now create Add-Ins that extend the VMM console.