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Microsoft Commercially Releases System Center 2022

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 01, 2022

The "general availability" commercial release of System Center 2022 is now available.

System Center 2022 includes six main "components" used for different IT tasks. Apparently, all of the components are available with the commercial release of the product except for Data Protection Manager, which Microsoft described as being "available in May 2022."

The Friday announcements included this one by Shashank Bansal, a principal program manager at Microsoft, as well as this one by Microsoft employee Bhavna Appayya. The System Center product landing page has been updated with 2022 information. Microsoft offers a 180-day trial version of the product at its Evaluation Center download page.

Here are the typical components in the System Center product suite:

• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is used for operational analytics.
• Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) adds management for virtual machines hosted on servers.
• Data Protection Manager (DPM) helps secure data (coming in May).
• Orchestrator is used for automating processes and integrating systems via runbooks.
• Service Manager is a tool for automating service management best practices.
• Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) is used for client and server deployments, configurations and management.

What's New in System Center 2022
Microsoft's Friday announcements didn't describe a whole lot of new System Center 2022 features. Most were earlier described in Microsoft's initial November announcement.

In general, System Center 2022 is said to play well with Windows Server 2022, and is also deemed a "best toolset" for use with SQL Server. The management suite also added support for Azure Stack HCI version 21H2, which is Microsoft's "Azure in a box" hardware product that combines compute, storage and networking on the same server in a cluster.

Microsoft highlighted a few other new System Center 2022 capabilities, as follows:

• SCOM has new "enhanced access control capabilities, Microsoft Teams integration and easier management of alert closures."
• SCOM has a newly added built-in "Read-only Administrator" role.
• SCOM has new enterprise Linux support for "Ubuntu 20, Oracle Linux 8, Debian 10 and Debian 11."
• VMM permits the assignment of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to managed virtual machines.
• DPM has improved online backup, with "item level restore for file/folder workloads" and it permits backup and restore operations for "private endpoints."

Nothing was said regarding ConfigMgr having new features. However, it gets frequently updated as part of the Microsoft Endpoint Manager subscriptions, bundled with Microsoft Intune, Microsoft's mobile device management service. ConfigMgr is still part of the System Center 2022 product, although Microsoft internally has apparently moved away from it, favoring Intune instead for its client device management.

The last Microsoft Endpoint Manager ConfigMgr release was update 2111 back in December, which added "orchestration groups" and "application groups" as full features.

System Center 2022 Hybrid Support To Come
Back in November, Microsoft had hinted that it was bringing "hybrid" (cloud plus on-premises) management capabilities to the System Center 2022 product suite for Software Assurance licensees. However, such hybrid management capabilities appear to be at yet-to-come and "stay tuned" level right now, per Microsoft's Friday announcements.

"We will be bringing hybrid capabilities with System Center 2022 to standardize management and governance across on-premises and cloud environments while reusing your existing investments in System Center," Bansal promised, although a timeline wasn't described.

Datacenter and Standard Editions
Microsoft is selling System Center 2022 in Datacenter and Standard editions, which both include the product's six components.

The Datacenter edition of System Center 2022 is designed for organizations overseeing "highly virtualized servers," with rights for "unlimited" operating system environments (OSEs) and Hyper-V containers. The Standard edition is for "nonvirtualized or lightly virtualized servers," with rights for two OSEs and Hyper-V containers.

These edition licensing details are described in Microsoft's System Center 2022 pricing datasheet, available for download at this page.

Organizations licensing System Center 2022 also have to buy licenses for the endpoints being managed, which Microsoft describes as Client Management Licenses and Server Management Licenses. The Server Management Licenses are said to be core-based, where all physical cores (16 minimum) in a server need to be licensed.