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Infrastructure Planning with System Centre 2012 and Windows Server 2012

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Hello Folks,

Planning your infrastructure with Systems Centre 2012 and Windows Server 2012 in mind is really important. It can bring you huge value, but like anything else in IT, it has the potential to be very confusing. The power and quality of these products is second to none.

Let’s start with a simple question. How many products make up System Center 2012? Most IT pros would answer 7

  1. System Center Orchestrator
  2. System Center Operations Manager
  3. System Center Service Manager
  4. System Center App Controller
  5. System Center Virtual Machine Manager
  6. System Center Configuration Manager
  7. System Center Data Protection Manager

Well… The correct answer is 1. System Center 2012 is sold as one product with multiple components.  Each components has a part to play in your environment to keep it flexible, automated, monitored and managed.

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Which means, if you already have System Center 2012, chances are that you are not leveraging the entire suite and are missing out on some tremendous value.

The power of System Center 2012 married with the robustness, capabilities and flexibility of our Cloud OS Windows Server 2012 is what gives you the value you are looking for and the foundation you need to setup your own Private Cloud. Private Cloud really means that you are leveraging the “capacity on demand”, the automation and self-serve capabilities of the Cloud in your own datacenter. But to get there you need to plan for it. You need to learn with it, you need to test it in lab.

Where do you start? Right here…clip_image004

The Private Cloud Evaluation kit will provide the bits you need to test and learn how to harness the power of Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 together. For example…

Windows Server 2012 provides:

  • Solid, reliable foundation with low footprint and overhead using Server Core configuration level and Features on Demand
  • Failover Clustering enables HA and capabilities such as single click patching of every node in the cluster with no service availability impact

System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager provides:

  • A management solution for the virtualized datacenter, enabling you to configure and manage your virtualization host, networking, and storage resources in order to create and deploy virtual machines and services to private clouds that you have created.
  • Machines, services, … Can be defined in templates that will cover multiple tiers (Web, middleware and database tiers)

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System Center Operations Manager provides:

  • Infrastructure monitoring capabilities that are flexible and cost-effective, it can help ensure the predictable performance and availability of the vital multi-tier application or services.
  • And the ability to drill down in each components of the service or multi-tier application to identify the exact location of the issue.

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So as you can see, there are so many permutation that can be put together to support your own environment. But is it important to plan for it.

Here are some Microsoft Virtual Academy resources that can help you in your learning and planning efforts:

I really think that once you’ve experience the benefit that these 2 products:

will bring to your environment you’ll wonder how you managed without them.

Cheers!

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Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Technology Evangelist
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