What's coming up with the next versions of SCOM and VMM!

For the folks onsite at MMS with us, hope you are having a great time! For the rest of us, we're trying our best to keep you informed of the happenings in here!

Among a ton of exciting vision from Bob Muglia’s keynote on April 20th, we're also announcing the capability set that we are working on for the next version of System Center. Our goal is to provide a unified management solution that delivers datacenter services across physical, virtual and cloud environments using an integrated app/service-centric model.

With that in mind, I’ve included below some of the Dynamic IT / cloud capabilities that Virtual Machine Manager vNext and Operations Manager vNext will deliver to lower operational expense and increase agility in the enterprise datacenter. Some of these capabilities will take a few cycles to fully realize, but we’re going to get rolling on them in the next version J

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

· Service lifecycle management, including creation, deployment and updates to cloud apps/services - Leverages app virtualization technology and service modeling to perform image-based service composition, deployment and updates.

· Creation of private clouds - Enables “Infrastructure as a Service” for the enterprise datacenter and allows self-service scenarios; discovery and assignment of logical/virtualized network and storage pools to apps/services

· Federation across clouds - Enables workload mobility between on-premises, service provider and public clouds (e.g. Windows Azure) in a secure manner

· Policy-based dynamic resource optimization – Ensure optimal utilization of your datacenter resources (e.g. policy driven power management), deeper Operations Manager/PRO integration

· Deeper Opalis Integration – Offers deeper integration with Opalis for enhanced orchestration and automation across multiple sub-systems

System Center Operations Manager

· Unified on-premises and cloud monitoring - Enables hybrid cloud deployment scenarios with “single pane of glass” monitoring

· Outside-in/end user experience monitoring for geo distributed cloud services (based on synthetic transactions)

· Service oriented network and storage monitoring (e.g. monitor and troubleshoot network and storage resource pools assigned to services)

Also check out this video I recorded to get additional information on our Datacenter vision and SCOM/VMM vNext.

Finally, I also wanted to highlight the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center, which will allow you to build your private cloud foundation very soon to help you accelerate your journey to the cloud. What's more, this solution is built on top of technology you currently have and are very familiar with - System Center and Windows Server!

We will provide additional details on these capabilities (and others) as we finalize them!

Ananthanarayan Sundaram, Product Marketing Manager - System Center, Microsoft Corp.