Systems Management Products

System Center 2016 was released in Oct. 2016, and System Center 2012 and 2012 R2 require service packs to qualify for support after July 2016. Shown here are current and expected releases for products in the System Center product line for client, server, and virtual machine management.

System Center 2016 was released at the same time as Windows Server 2016, in Oct. 2016. Microsoft generally updates System Center at the same time as Windows Server; both may receive updates to 2016 R2 versions in the third quarter of 2019. In the past, System Center has been updated frequently between major releases with cumulative update rollup packages, but that practice might not continue. Instead, Microsoft is likely to adopt a more continuous update process similar to those introduced for Windows 10 (“branches”) and Office (“channels”). The company has already adopted this update process for Configuration Manager.

One updated System Center product—Configuration Manager (including the Endpoint Protection antimalware that is managed by Configuration Manager)—was released in the fourth quarter of 2015 with support for deploying and managing Windows 10. Configuration Manager will be updated frequently, and different versions will follow a similar support schedule to Windows 10. Updates drop the version number of previous releases and are simply called Configuration Manager. (But it is shown as 2016 here because the latest version was delivered at the same time as System Center 2016.) Microsoft differentiates releases and updates using month and year notation; for example, the version released in Dec. 2015 is called Configuration Manager version 1511 because the code was released in Nov. 2015. The latest update is version 1610.