System Center

System Center 2012 R2 delivers unified management across on-premises, service provider, and Microsoft Azure environments, in a manner that’s simple, cost-effective, application focused, and enterprise-class.

System Center 2012 R2 delivers unified management across on-premises, service provider, and Microsoft Azure environments, thereby enabling the Microsoft Cloud OS. System Center 2012 R2 offers exciting new features and enhancements across infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service, and IT service management.

Capabilities

Infrastructure provisioning

System Center helps you manage virtual and cloud environments with full support for Windows Server capabilities, including industry-leading Hyper-V scale and performance, plus support for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. It also delivers robust support for Linux-based environments, with full support for Dynamic Memory. System Center allows VM connectivity to fibre channel-based SAN so you can virtualize the most demanding workloads and connect them to your highest-tier storage platforms. To drive down storage costs for your business-critical workloads, it enables bare metal provisioning and cluster creation of scale-out file server clusters. System Center enables virtual networking for multitenant environments along with automated provisioning of edge gateways that bridge physical and virtual networks. System Center delivers reliable and cost-effective automation to help you drive operational efficiency. You can also migrate on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure through the familiar System Center experience. The Configuration Manager component helps you automate physical server deployments, software inventory, and in-guest updates.

Infrastructure monitoring

System Center provides best-of-breed Windows Server monitoring and robust cross-platform monitoring support (including RHEL/SUSE Linux, Oracle Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX). You can assure physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure health with the familiar Operations Manager console. Built-in network topology discovery allows you to monitor the health of your network devices. The connector between VMM and Operations Manager components enables granular monitoring of your private cloud infrastructure resources. The System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure allows granular monitoring of Microsoft Azure resources. You can monitor your VMware infrastructure with the VEEAM Management Pack. And you can ensure reliable workload configurations using the System Center Advisor connector for Operations Manager.

Automation and self-service

Use service templates for faster and repeatable application and workload provisioning—for example, to define and deploy a SharePoint farm for use by application owners. With the Windows Azure Pack, you can deploy scalable, multi-VM infrastructure services such as SQL clusters for use by application owners. Work with application owners to define the policies that govern the underlying infrastructure services, empowering them while retaining control. To ensure hybrid IT consistency between on-premises and Microsoft Azure environments, System Center provides unified views (through the App Controller component) and supports common deployment artifacts such as VHDs for Windows Server and Linux. Finally, System Center enables dynamic capacity expansion to support application needs through robust automation workflows (based on PowerShell and the Orchestrator component) and Integration Packs (including Integration Packs for Microsoft Azure and SharePoint).

Application performance monitoring

System Center assures LOB application SLAs by providing deep application insight for .NET and Java applications, including line-of-code level traceability to pinpoint and resolve issues that impact application health. Through integration with System Center Alliance partner BlueStripe, System Center can enable transaction monitoring. Achieve a rapid application lifecycle by delivering dev-ops capabilities that span people, process, and systems. Deep Visual Studio-System Center integration makes it possible for developers to work productively with their operations counterparts in a cloud-optimized release cadence. System Center Global Service Monitor gives you outside-in monitoring for web applications through Microsoft Azure-based global points of presence for a 360-degree view of application health.

IT service management

System Center offers easy publishing and consumption of IT services by enabling self-service requests for private cloud capacity through a Service Catalog and Cloud Service Process Pack. You get deep integration of people, process and knowledge with a CMDB as well as pre-defined industry-standard workflows for core datacenter processes. You can even measure and increase efficiencies of your operation through granular resource metering for chargeback combined with a data warehouse for SLA tracking and reporting.