Major Systems Management Products

A major wave of systems management releases originally planned for 2011 is now due in the first half of 2012. Shown here are current and planned releases for products in the System Center line for server and virtual machine (VM) management.

Configuration Manager 2007 R3 was released in Oct. 2010. Release candidates of Configuration Manager 2012 and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 became available in Oct. 2011 and Sept. 2011, respectively. A beta of Operations Manager 2012 arrived in July 2011; it includes AVIcode software (acquired in Oct. 2010) for monitoring .NET applications. Final releases of all three products are now expected in the first half of 2012.

Two new System Center products have been announced. App Controller 2012, a new VM management tool (previously code-named Concero), provides self-service management of VMs using VMM technology. A beta of App Controller 2012 was released in Oct. 2011, and final release is planned for the first half of 2012. System Center Advisor (previously code-named Atlanta) provides online monitoring of Windows Servers and SQL Servers. Advisor is currently in release candidate stage, and final release will be in early 2012. Since Advisor is an online service, Microsoft is expected to release updates frequently.