News
        
        System Center 2012 CTPs for Windows Server 8 Released
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
- March 13, 2012
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.