How Sweet are Suites?

Something new in the world of System Center licensing are suites, which collect different licenses together in a way that reduces the cost of ownership for end users. The System Center Server Management Suites come in two flavours which are designed for basic and advanced workloads which are on parity with the other licensing norms for System Center. If you are looking at any two of the main three technologies for server management then the suites could provide a better option with extra functionality.

Server Management Suite Standard

The standard suite includes standard server management licenses for Configuration Manager, Operations Manager and Data Protection Manager. So if you have a file server that you want to completely monitor, manage and back up, this is the choice for you. This is licensed on the per operating environment basis.

Server Management Suite Enterprise

As above but includes Enterprise Server Management Licenses for each of the System Center workloads in addition to another tool: Virtual Machine Manager. From a licensing standpoint the enterprise suites are licensed per physical server, so if you were to virtualise multiple OS instances on the server this negates the need to buy lots of standard suites

Sandeep Modhvadia