System Center 2012 SP1 CTP2 Now Available

The System Center team is pleased to announce that the second community technology preview (CTP2) of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for download.

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate
Microsoft’s Private Cloud is built on the industry leading foundation of Windows Server and System Center. The System Center 2012 SP1 update enables System Center to run on and manage the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate highlighted at TechEd North America this week. System Center 2012 SP1 scales management to complement the scaling in Windows Server and also adds System Center manageability to the new capabilities in Windows Server 2012 such as virtual networking.

Windows Azure Virtual Machines
Last week the Windows Azure team announced the release preview of “Windows Azure Virtual Machines”, enabling you to move virtual hard disks (VHDs) between on-premises and cloud. System Center 2012 SP1 integrates with the Azure virtual machines enabling you to:

  • Move on-premise virtual machines to Azure using App Controller.
  • Manage Azure virtual machines from your on-premises System Center using App Controller and Orchestrator using the new Azure Integration Pack.

Global Service Monitor
A new cloud enabled capability called “Global Service Monitor” (GSM) extends the application monitoring in System Center 2012 to enable you to add “outside-in” testing to incorporate a true reflection of users’ experience of your web site or web application. Through the System Center 2012 Operations Manager console you schedule the GSM cloud service, hosted in Windows Azure, to issue synthetic transactions against your web facing application from Azure points of present around the globe. GSM reports back the results (availability, performance, functionality) to your on-premises operations manager dashboard. You can integrate this perspective with other monitoring data from the same application, taking action as soon as any issues are detected in order to achieve your SLA. To evaluate System Center 2012 SP1 with GSM, sign up for the customer preview of GSM.

Hosted Clouds
System Center 2012 helps you optimize your organization’s use of both private cloud and Windows Azure resources through the App Controller component. System Center 2012 SP1 extends App Controller’s capabilities to include cloud resources offered by Hosting Service Providers, giving you the option of consuming a wide range of custom and commodity IaaS cloud services from your Service Provider. For Service Providers, System Center 2012 SP1 adds the new “Service Provider Foundation” (SPF) API. SPF is an extensible OData REST API that can be easily integrated with the hoster’s customer portal and is automatically integrated with customers’ on-premises App Controller. A simple exchange of credentials enables enterprises to add the Service Provider cloud to App Controller for consumption alongside private and public cloud resources. SPF also has multi-tenancy built-in and can operate at massive scale, controlling multiple scale-units built around Virtual Machine Manager.

More information
Check back  here in the coming weeks and months for updates on System Center 2012. Read more details today about the System Center 2012 SP1 CTP2 on any of the System Center component-level blogs listed here:

 

Thank you for reading!

 

Server & Cloud Platform Team