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Private Cloud

Private Cloud depends on the flexible pooling of computing, storage, networking, and software resources. This pooling helps deliver greater utilization and efficiency and is powered by virtualization, which abstracts the platform from the physical infrastructure. Multiple organizational units within a business can share pooled resources, resulting in higher resource utilization and on-demaind automated resource provisioning.

System Center 2012 

System Center 2012 contains the following products:

  • Configuration Manager - IT asset management
  • Operations Manager - monitoring
  • Service Manager - IT process management
  • Virtual Machine Manager - Virtual Machine management and services deployment
  • Orchestrator - orchestration across the System Center products and 3rd party products
  • Data Protection Manager - Backup and Disaster Recovery
  • App Controller - providing self service management of Microsoft private and public clouds including Azure IaaS

System Center 2012 SP1 releases some additional functionality in each of the products. All of the changes are detailed in the “What’s new in System Center 2012 SP1” section which can be found on Microsoft TechNet.

Configuration Manager:

  • Clients for Mac, Linux and Unix
  • Windows PowerShell cmdlets
  • Support for installing Windows 8 applications (.appx files) or links to the Windows Store
  • Support for a distribution point hosted on Azure
  • Integration with Windows Intune (Microsofts SaaS equivalent of Configuration Manager)
  • Support for Microsoft Application Virtualization version 5.0
  • Integrated the functionality of the former Windows Embedded Device Manager for managing Windows installations containing so called write filters.

Operations Manager:

  • Application Performance Monitoring improvements including Monitoring of Windows Services build on the .NET Framework and Automatic Discovery of ASP.NET, MVC3 and MVC4 Applications
  • Integration with Team Foundation Server
  • Management packs for monitoring Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8
  • Audit Collection Services (ACS) support for Dynamic Access Control
  • Support for monitoring CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu Linux

Service Manager:

  • Chargeback, to apply cloud-based pricing on Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) fabric
  • Improved Operations Manager integration

Virtual Machine Manager:

  • Support for all the new network functionality released in Windows Server 2012 (network virtualization, extensible switch)
  • VHDX Support
  • Support for SMB 3.0 file shares
  • Support for SMS-S CIM-XML and SMP storage providers

Orchestrator:

  • Service Provider Foundation (SPF), a web service acting as a intermediary between web-based administration client and server applications, supporting REST-based requests using the OData protocol
  • Exchange Administrator and Exchange Users Integration Pack
  • Representational State Transfer (REST) Integration Pack Guide
  • Updated Integration Packs for Active Directory, HP Service Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and VMware vSphere.

Data Protection Manager:

  • Support for CSV 2.0
  • Hyper-V protection over remote SMB share
  • Support for Hyper-V Live Migration
  • Protection of Windows 8 deduplicated volumes
  • Integration with Windows Azure Online Backup
  • Support for protection of SQL Server 2012 DBs using AlwaysOn
  • Support for hosting the DPM database on a stand-alone instance of SQL Server 2012
  • Support for protecting file servers which use the Resilient File System (ReFS)

App Controller:

  • Support to deploy, manage and operate Windows Azure VMs
  • Support for uploading VMs from private to public cloud
  • Support for connecting to a hosting provider using VMM clouds.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 offers key new features that include hypervisor creation and management, network management, storage management, private cloud creation, self-service usage and service creation. It features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design and service modeling all of which can be used to efficiently offer an on-premises private cloud.

 Feature Summary:

•Fabric Management

Setup Upgrade

*New:

Upgrade - Setup will support the following upgrade paths:

-VMM 2008 R2 SP1 --SC VMM 2012 RC -- SC VMM 2012 RTM

-SC VMM 2012 RC -- SC VMM 2012 RTM

Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster

*New:

-ISO or CD-based OSD for environments with DHCP without WDS

-OSD will now convert dynamic to fixed type of VHD destination

-All network adapters on host can be configured during provisioning

-Ability to bypass cluster validation during cluster creation

-Run cluster validation reports on-demand

-New Cluster status tab to view an aggregated status and a cluster validation report

-Ability to see current CSV owner in the properties of the cluster

Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers

*New:

-Simplification of the logical networks in the Fabric workspace

-Ability to see IP addresses that are in use from a IP pool

-Added support for Microsoft Network Load Balancer

-Gateway and DNS are no longer mandatory fields for logical networks

-Load balancer can now support affinity to logical networks

Storage Management – Classify Storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs

*New:

-Create persistent sessions to iSCSI array and logon initiator to array

-Better scalability of storage operations - LUN create, snapshot, clone, masking, and unmasking

-Option to create storage groups per cluster

-Enablement of MPIO feature when provisioning a new Hyper-V server

-Automatic MPIO device claim

-Support for arrays that implement OnePortPerView

Update Management- Keep your VMM Fabric Servers (VMM roles, hosts, and clusters) up-to-date with patches.

*New:

-Share a WSUS root server between System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2/ System Center Configuration Manager 2012

-Hyper-V Cluster Orchestration- Nodes put into VMM Maintenance Mode can be set to trigger Maintenance Mode in Operations Manager.

Resource Optimization

Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed.

*New:

-Set Operations Manager Mode for powered down hosts

PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors.

*New:

-Support added for System Center Operations Manager 2012

-VMM will ship two sample PRO Packs: Cluster scale out and Service scale out MPs

Service Lifecycle Management

-Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, OS images and application packages

*New:

-Service Designer and Specialization UI enhancements

-Added ability to use Service Template Patterns

Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment

*New:

-IP-based provisioning

-New application instance view

Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing

*New:

-Streamlined ability to enable OS VHD updates to a Service Template

-Publish updated Service Templates in order to update Service Instances

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