News

Microsoft Says System Center 2022 Will Arrive Early Next Year

• By Kurt Mackie
• September 23, 2021

Microsoft is planning to release its new System Center product in the first quarter of 2022.

The company briefly discussed System Center 2022 last week during an online event promoting Windows Server 2022, which became generally available earlier this month.

"We are excited about System Centers' next big release, System Center 2022," said Prasidh Arora, a program manager for Windows Server, during the talk (available on demand here). "System Center 2022 is planned for release in quarter one of next calendar year. Key areas of focus for System Center 2022 would be around adding capabilities to support heterogeneous infrastructure. We will be adding support for Windows Server 2022 and Azure Stack HCI 21H2. Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you can manage Azure Stack HCI clusters, and the upcoming release will also have Azure registration experience built into VMM to register Azure stack HCI clusters to Azure."

System Center came up during the talk as an alternative to the free browser-based Windows Admin Center for managing Windows Server 2022. Windows Admin Center is currently at version 2103.2 and can be used for "managing servers, clusters, hyperconverged infrastructure, Kubernetes, Windows 10 PCs" and more.

"Windows Admin Center is designed to be that lightweight browser-based management tool that is an alternative to RDP MMC tools, or even Remote PowerShell," Arora said.

However, System Center is the tool to address more complex management needs, according to Srividya Varanasi, a Microsoft senior program manager on the System Center team.

"At your datacenter scale, you may want to standardize deployment production infrastructure at scale, and be able to monitor and backup multiple workloads and automate all of these processes," Varanasi said. "System Center suite helps in meeting all at-scale datacenter management requirements."

Other System Center 2022 perks mentioned during the talk included:

• System Center Operations Manager will have integration with Microsoft Teams to receive alerts and mitigate issues.
• System Center Operations Manager will get custom roles to be defined by users.
• Data Protection Manager users will have a folder-level restore for VM backups with recovery points.
• Parallel restoring will be available for multiple VMware VMs managed by a vCenter instance.

A "private preview release" of System Center 2022 is planned and is expected to be available in the next couple of months, Arora indicated.