System Center Essentials Team Blog : Virtualization

SCE 2010 Podcast on Virtualization

JasonBuffington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Recently, the folks at TechNet Edge sat down with David Mills and Edwin Yuen for a brief discussion of Microsoft’s IT management and virtualization solution for midsize businesses.

With the release of public betas for System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010, customers will have the capability to easily manage, backup and restore their physical and virtual servers in an integrated way.

After discussing the benefits of using Hyper-V, SCE 2010 and DPM 2010, Edwin gives us a quick demo of SCE 2010’s integrated virtual and physical management capabilities.

For more information and to download public betas, go to:

SCE 2010: www.microsoft.com/SCE

DPM 2010: www.microsoft.com/DPM

SCE 2010 Public Beta is HERE!

damills — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:07:00 GMT

Do you know what time it is? Yes, it’s THAT time…time for you to check out the next full release of System Center Essentials – SCE 2010! For those of you who were with us for the release of System Center Essentials 2007 a little over two years ago, you know that this is Microsoft’s IT management solution specifically designed for midsized businesses. From one console, SCE allows you to monitor and manage your servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services.

Over the last two years, we’ve been getting some great feedback from customers using SCE 2007, investigating ways to improve on the existing features AND address a new trend we’ve been seeing with customers’ virtualizing server workloads. Based on all this input, the engineering team has invested a lot of work into making the following updates in this next release. We’ve -

Integrated server virtualization management support, built on VMM 2008 R2 technology, including easy template-based creation of new virtual servers and live migration
Adjusted licensing limits to allow for management of virtual servers
Rewritten setup for an easier, intuitive installation
Built-in automatic Microsoft Update subscription maintenance
Provided flexible computer grouping
Added additional software distribution target criteria

Plus a lot, lot more!So, what are you waiting for? Stop reading my blog entry and head to this URL to download the SCE 2010 trial! http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee470677.aspx

David Mills

Sr. Product Manager

System Center 2007 and Virtualization

Richard Rundle — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:52:04 GMT

At the Microsoft Management Summit and TechEd this year we announced System Center Essentials 2010, the next version of Essentials. We also started to talk about the new features, in particular how we’ve placed virtualization capabilities in Essentials, providing a single location for monitoring and managing virtual computers.

You don’t need to wait for Essentials 2010 though to get started with virtualization management in Essentials.

Essentials 2007 supports virtualization in the following ways:

Essentials server can run on a virtualized operating system, i.e. you don’t need a physical server for Essentials.
Managed computers can be virtual. The Essentials agent will monitor and manage your virtual computers the same as your physical computers.

If you have System Center Virtual Machine Manager (including Workgroup Edition) you can go one step further and not only monitor virtual computers, but also create and control (start/stop etc) virtual computers.

Instructions for configuring Essentials and VMM are now available on TechNet to help you get started.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759392.aspx

If you’ve previously followed Pete Zerger’s instructions for configuring Essentials and VMM you’ll be pleased to know that there are updated MPs available that include reports for Virtualization.

With Essentials 2007 and VMM you will use 2 consoles, but when Essentials 2010 is released you will have a single console for monitoring and managing both your virtual and physical computers.