System Center has long been the platform of choice for managing Windows servers. The recent release of System Center 2012 SP1 brings that same level of management smarts to the Cloud OS, allowing you to manage on-premises Windows Server 2012 systems and remote cloud instances with equal ease.
With System Center 2012, you can now manage your entire business infrastructure — servers, data centres and cloud deployments — from a single product. The ability to manage Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 means you can take full advantage of the new features on those platforms, including the enhanced capabilities of the Hyper-V hypervisor. Virtual Machine Manager can now handle up to 8000 VMS on each instance and you can expand with additional instances to control a data centre of any size.
That commitment to virtualisation is also evident in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach which has driven development of both Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. Rather than being trapped by the physical topology of your network infrastructure, SDN adds a layer of abstraction so you can easily make network changes to match changing needs.
System Center 2012 SP1 includes management capabilities that make it easy to reconfigure entire networks. In more complex scenarios, the Hyper-V Extensible Switch allows third-party software to integrate with SDN policies.
Working with cloud deployments is also made simpler with System Center 2012 SP1. You can host server backups in the Azure cloud for flexible access. You can manage virtual machine instances on Windows Azure directly, or use the App Controller infrastructure to manage instances from other third-party cloud providers. Those tools make it easy to build the hybrid cloud without needing a hybrid suite of management tools to match,
Want to try out System Center 2012 SP1? Download the evaluation release.
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