System Center 2012 SP1 Beta is built for compatibility with Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and other enhancements including support for Azure VM and capabilities for Hosted Service Providers. Each System Center 2012 components can be downloaded separately for evaluation purpose, which includes: -

• Virtual Machine Manager 
  • Improved Support for Network Virtualization
  • Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
  • Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
  • Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
• Configuration Manager 
  • Deployment and management of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
  • Distribution point for Windows Azure which helps to reduce infrastructure costs
  • Automation of administrative tasks through PowerShell support
  • Management of Mac OS X clients and Linux and UNIX servers
  • Real-time administrative actions for Endpoint Protection related tasks
• Data Protection Manager 
  • Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
  • Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
  • Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
  • Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
• App Controller 
  • Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
  • Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
• Operations Manager 
  • Support for IIS 8
  • Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
  • Azure SDK support
  • Monitoring of SharePoint 2010 with APM (.NET application performance monitoring)
  • Integration with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2012
  • Conversion of Application Performance Monitoring events to IntelliTrace format
  • Support for monitoring of CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux
  • Improved Heartbeat monitoring for Unix/Linux
  • ACS support for Dynamic Access Control in Windows Server 2012
  • Global Service Monitor – cloud based capability to monitor the health of your web applications from geo-distributed perspective
  • Additional network devices models supported
  • Visibility into virtual network switches in vicinity dashboard – thru integration with Virtual Machine Manager
• Orchestrator 
  • Support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
  • Manage VMM self-service User Roles
  • Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
  • Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
• Service Manager
  • Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
  • Create chargeback reports
  • Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
• Server App-V 
  • Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
  • Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

Supported operating systems:

• Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012.
• The Virtual Machine Manager server for the Beta release of System Center 2012 SP1 will only run on Windows Server 2012. For full prerequisites, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=263753.
• Prerequisites for Configuration Manager are here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252950.
• All other components now support Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 in addition to the operating systems that were supported in System Center 2012.
• For details on what was supported in System Center 2012, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=255218.

Related resources:

Useful downloads:

Ken Sim, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation