Systems Management

Products for managing Windows computers, including virtualization technologies, Systems Management Server, Microsoft Operations Manager, and other System Center products

Microsoft’s systems management roadmap for the next two years has become increasingly clear. The company has consolidated all of its systems management technologies and products under a single vice president (and a family of management products named System Center) and will eventually rely on a uniform client infrastructure for software patching. Meanwhile, virtualization products are becoming a critical solution for both systems management, and interoperability with other OSs.

Virtualization

Microsoft continues to rapidly expand its efforts in virtualization technology, which has significant implications for how datacenters are designed and managed and how both server and desktop applications are deployed, installed, and maintained.

The company offers two very different but complementary types of virtualization technologies, hardware virtualization and operating system virtualization. (For a graphical overview of releases and retirements for virtualization technology, see the illustration “Virtualization Overview“.)