When is System Center Essentials the right fit?
Often asked question: When is System Center Essentials the right fit?
Answer:
To help you decide which solution is best for your needs you need to follow guidance below:
Business Considerations
Essentials 2007 is likely to be the best IT management solution for a majority of midsize businesses, so long as they are within the scale limits of 30 Windows Servers and 500 Windows Clients. However, determining the right IT management solution for your company may be determined by the maturity and complexity of your IT environment and business needs.
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If your company is a publicly owned company, then you can be held to certain IT standards like Sarbanes Oxley compliance, so you might require features offered by Operations Manager 2007 like Audit Collection Services and Data warehousing. |
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If your business employs 1-5 IT administrators who perform a broad range of tasks, then Essentials 2007 may be the best solution for you. If your company employs IT specialists (your IT administrators have distinct and separate IT roles like database administrator, or desktop administrator), you probably need the role-based security provided by Operations Manager 2007. |
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If you frequently need to add new Client machines to your IT environment, you may need full operating system deployment and desktop desired configuration features delivered by Configuration Manager 2007. |
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If your company has more than 3-5 branch offices and/or the branches are large scale and complex in IT configuration, you should consider using Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007. |
Detailed comparison with System Center Operations Manager 2007
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Monitoring |
OpsMgr 2007 |
Essentials 2007 |
Essentials 2007 difference |
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Monitoring of Windows Servers, Clients, Hardware, Software & Services |
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Essentials ships with a Network device management pack |
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Management Packs with Expert Knowledge |
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Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) |
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Add Monitoring Wizard |
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Reporting |
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Essentials data storage limited to 40 days. No report authoring. |
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Branch office monitoring |
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Essentials 2007 is a single server solution; no tiered connection of servers. |
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Role-based security |
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Local or domain admin only for Essentials 2007 server. |
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Connector Framework |
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Audit Collection Services |
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Web Console |
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Detailed comparison with System Center Configuration Manager 2007
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Configuration |
ConfigMgr 2007 |
Essentials 2007 |
Essentials 2007 difference |
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Patch Mgmt (Microsoft & Third party) |
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Software Distribution |
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Essentials offers basic .MSI and .EXE deployment with optional command line parameters. No advanced packaging capability. |
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Hardware and Software Inventory |
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Essentials collects 60+ fixed software and hardware attributes. Configuration Manager 2007 inventory is extensible. |
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Branch office updates and software dist. |
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Essentials is a single server solution using BITS 2.0 (bandwidth aware). No site replication servers. |
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Operating System Deployment |
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Desired Configuration management |
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Wake on LAN |
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Network Address Protection (NAP) integration |
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From a licensing perspective there isn’t currently an upgrade path from Essentials to the full System Center suite.
Upgrading from an infrastructure perspective is also not much of a better story: what is supported for the moment is re-importing of old management packs to Operations Manager 2007.
The impact of this to you is that if your infrastructure is likely to grow beyond the 30 server/500 PC limit in the near future then it would make sense to consider moving immedaitely the enterprise suite. However if you are confident that this will not be the case then Essentials is a fantastic product which really fits the fast majority of mid-market customer scenarios -:-)
