Microsoft System Center has been the data centre management tool for large enterprises for more than 15 years. System Center has something for all aspects of the data centre, whether planning, deployment, protection, management, or automation.

Some of the key capabilities include;

• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) provides rich real-time health models and alerts for infrastructure monitoring.
• Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) provides cutting-edge management capabilities at scale for Hyper-V and supports Azure Stack HCI.
• Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) provide industry-leading backup solutions for Windows SQL Server, Hyper-V, and VMware virtual machines.
• System Center Orchestrator provides integration packs for first-party and third-party services.
• System Center Service Manager (SCSM) provides incident management, asset life cycle management, and change management capabilities.
• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) provides a comprehensive tool for change and configuration management.

Datacenter management is complex with multiple components across compute, storage and networking, yet vital for the continuous operations of an organization. Since its release in 2008, Microsoft System Center has provided leading-edge capabilities that deliver a simplified management experience to keep you in control On-premises, in the Cloud, or across platforms. There are two versions of System Center: Long-Term Servicing Channels (LTSC) and the new Semi-Annual Channel (SAC). To help you update on the infrastructure and management, Microsoft makes continuous investments across all System Center components. They have announced the next chapter in the System Center journey, System Center 2022. The new version adds new features to products based on customer feedback. It also adds support for Windows Server 2022 and includes fixes for bugs encountered across the customer base.

Introducing System Center 2022

System Center 2022 is modelled around three themes namely, best-in-class data centre operations, managing heterogeneous infrastructure, and modernizing management with Azure. In a nutshell, you will get simplified data centre management and monitoring, whether On-premises, in the Cloud or across platforms, with System Center 2022. Microsoft recognizes your long-standing investment in System Center technologies such as Configurations Manager, Operations Manager, VM manager, DPM, etc. They aim to provide flexibility to pick and choose hardware and software in your environment as the business needs to evolve without needing to fragment the management stack or move away from your existing System Center investments.

Best-in-Class Datacenter Operations

With System Center 2022, Microsoft extends the limits under management and helps you embrace organizational developments like DevOps.

Enhanced RBAC capabilities in SCOM

In SCOM, user roles help you assign permissions for access to monitoring data and perform various actions. User roles apply to groups of users and scope to a group of monitored objects. Various personas that use SCOM, such as different lines of businesses, application owners, and SCOM admins, need to collaborate to keep the infrastructure and applications running. With the advent of DevOps, the boundaries between the personas are shrinking. With SCOM 2022, Microsoft introduces a new read-only administrator that provides all the read permissions in Operations Manager, including reporting. It also added a new delegated administrator profile, which is the read-only administrator profile without reporting. Creating a custom user role is now easier with the delegated administrator as the base profile and then adding a category of permissions such as agent management, notification management, reporting permissions, etc.

MS Teams integration with SCOM

MS Teams is a platform of choice for a large number of customers for their collaboration needs. Organizations interact with each other on Teams, and users spend an ever-increasing time on it. SCOM 2022 would support sending notifications to MS Teams replacing Skype for business notifications.

ITOM compliant alerts closure

With SCOM 2019, an alert generated by a monitor could not be closed unless the health state of the corresponding monitor is healthy. If you try to close the alert generated by an unhealthy monitor, an error message appears, and that alert will not close. This behaviour has changed with Operations Manager 2022, and admin users can choose the alert closure of a health monitor in an unhealthy state.

Improved item-level restore in DPM

DPM 2022 removes the requirement of file catalogue metadata which was needed to restore individual files and folders from online recovery points. Now DPM uses ISCSI based approach for item-level restore by default. This improves backup time and restores the experience.

Backup storage up to 300TB

Microsoft extends the maximum supported backup storage limit to 300 TB from 120TB. It is highly recommended to use tiered storage to get better performance which is a combination of a small amount of SSD and HDD storage.

Assign IPv4 and IPv6 address to SDN VMs

Adds dual-stack support in VMM that allow customers to assign IPv4 and IPv6 address to SDN managed virtual machines.

Manage heterogeneous infrastructure

The following features help unify management across diverse workloads.

The best platform to manage Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server

System Center is the best platform to manage your Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server infrastructure. This includes support for SCOM 2022 installation on Windows Server 2022 and monitoring workloads running on it. VMM provides support for managing Windows Server 2022, and Hyper-V hosts along with the support for installation of DPM 2022 and protection of workloads running on Windows Server 2022.

Ubuntu 20, Debian 10, Oracle Linux 8 support in SCOM

Customers have a diverse environment in terms of running workloads on Windows and Linux. Linux monitoring is one of the core focus areas, and Microsoft is committed to making it better for enterprises of all sizes. Now SCOM supports Ubuntu 20, Oracle Linux 8, Debian 10, and Debian 11.

Manage and monitor Azure Stack HCI with VMM, MABS and SCOM

Azure Stack HCI is the hyper-converged infrastructure operating system that runs on On-premises clusters with virtualized workloads. You can add, deploy, and manage Azure Stack HCI clusters in VMM 2022. Managing Azure Stack HCI clusters in VMM is similar to managing Windows Server clusters, making it easier to adopt HCI without changing your internal processes. SCOM also introduces the Azure Stack HCI Management Pack that focuses on the capabilities to monitor Azure Stack HCI scenarios for Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, SDN, and failover clusters for Azure Stack HCI customers. The recently released Microsoft Azure Backup Server V3 provides the ability to back up workloads on HCI to the Cloud.

VMware 7.0 support in DPM

Now DPM 2022 adds support for backup of vSphere 7.0 in addition to vSphere 6.7 and 6.5 virtual machines.

Parallel restore of VMware VMs

Microsoft supports restoring more than one VMware virtual machine in parallel in DPM. By default, 8 VMs can be restored parallel, but you can customize this limit as it suits you.

In the next part, you will see a demo of HCI management highlights with System Center in action.

Reference

Microsoft Ignite Sessions