Purchasing Pre-2012 System Center Licenses

Some of the pre-2012 System Center licenses will continue to be available for a limited period of time to allow customers to expand current deployments of System Center under the old licensing model and prices. This chart shows key dates after which management licenses (MLs) or Software Assurance (SA) options will become unavailable for existing System Center products. These dates apply to Open and Select program customers. Organizations that purchase System Center licenses through an Enterprise Agreement generally retain the right to buy under the old licensing model and prices through the end of their agreements. However, depending on purchase timing, there may be some limitations with respect to qualifying for favorable SA license grants.

SMSE and SMSD. Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) and Server Management Suite Datacenter (SMSD) licenses allow a server to be managed by five pre-2012 version System Center products. They will no longer be sold after System Center 2012 general availability (GA) in April 2012. Thereafter, customers will have to purchase the new System Center 2012 Standard or Datacenter suite licenses and exercise downgrade rights. Also, after System Center 2012 GA, customers renewing SA on SMSE or SMSD will pay higher rates based on their license grants, rather than on their original license prices. For example, a customer renewing SA on an SMSE license will pay a rate based on the price of two System Center 2012 Standard Server MLs, while a customer renewing SA on an SMSD license will pay a rate based on the price of one System Center 2012 Datacenter Server ML.