Impact on PRO when upgrading SCOM and SCVMM to System Center 2012 (So many Questions. So Little Time. Part 4.)

This question was asked by Aubrey M at our Kansas City TechNet Event last week…

“If you have PRO enabled between SCOM 2007 R2 and SCVMM, how will that affect the upgrade process for these two systems?”

(For those of you who haven’t heard of PRO, check out this resource.)

The short answer is that upgrading SCVMM to the new 2012 version will remove the connection/integration between OpsManager and VMM.  Here are the bullet-points from the “Planning Considerations for Upgrading to VMM” page:

• Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) configurations are not maintained during an upgrade to System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager.
• If you have an existing connection to Operations Manager, the connection is removed during the upgrade process.
• If you do not want the connection to be removed automatically, remove the connection manually before upgrading.
• After the upgrade process completes, you can reconfigure your connection to Operations Manager.
• For information about using Operations Manager with System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager, see Configuring Operations Manager Integration with VMM.

Yours is an excellent question, and one that is related to (and begs the answer to) the bigger question: Will I be able to do an in-place upgrade?  And the answer to that question is different depending upon which System Center product you are moving to 2012.  So here is a quick-and-dirty list of the new System Center 2012 products, whether or not they support an in-place upgrade, and where to go for more information.  (Note: this list only assumes that you have the most recent version of the current application, and are running them on Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1.  See the “additional information” links for complete requirements, considerations, and guidance.)

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 
In-place upgrade supported: Yes
Additional Information HERE.

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 
In-place upgrade supported: No.  It’s a migration.
Additional Information HERE

System Center Operations Manager 2012 In-place upgrade supported: Yes
Additional Information HERE

System Center Service Manager 2012  
In-place upgrade supported: Yes
Additional Information HERE (beta)

System Center Orchestrator 2012 (from Opalis)
In-place upgrade supported: No.  It’s a migration.
Additional Information HERE