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System Center 2012 CTPs for Windows Server 8 Released

Two components of Microsoft's System Center 2012 suite, Virtual Machine Manager and Data Protection Manager, were released late last week as community technology previews (CTPs) that are specifically designed to work with the new Windows Server 8 beta.

The CTPs, which can be downloaded here, require a computing environment that has SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (64-bit editions), .NET 3.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor installed.

System Center 2012 hit its release candidate (RC) milestone in January and is publicly available as an evaluation copy, but it currently only works with Windows Server 2008 R2. The important point to note with regard to the new CTPs is that they are the only publicly available System Center 2012 components to tap into the newly released Windows Server 8 beta.

The current RC release of System Center 2012 will not support some Windows Server 8 features until after Microsoft's new server product is released. Those currently unsupported features include live storage migration, "shared nothing" live migrations and the virtual hard disk format VHDX, according to a Microsoft blog post. Support for those features likely will arrive with a future update to System Center 2012, the blog speculated.

In the meantime, testers who want to try out the latest Virtual Machine Manager and Data Protection Manager System Center 2012 releases that do work with Windows Server 8 can download the CTPs. Microsoft is looking for very specific feedback, as outlined in this blog post.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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