All System Center 2012 products to be released ONLY as a single suite

Yestrday Microsoft announced that System Center 2012 has gone to Release Candidate status, along with a major twist: the individual editions of the various System Center branded products are no more. System Center 2012 will be released only as a single suite of the following products:

• App Controller
• Configuration Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Endpoint Protection
• Operations Manager
• Orchestrator
• Service Manager
• Virtual Machine Manager

There are two editions (Standard and Datacenter), but the only difference between the two is that Standard allows for 2 VMs per licence, while Datacenter allows for unlimited (similar to Windows Server licensing). The feature set is otherwise identical.

All the info is on the System Center site: Microsoft System Center 2012 | System Center Next Version

Personally, this concerns me. Having previously used System Center Essentials 2010, I've seen first hand the dogs dinner Microsoft made of 'integrating' System Center products into one package. Hopefully they've done a better job this time, and for those using multiple System Center products already, I suspect the new all-you-can-eat licensing will work out cheaper. However, I use ONLY Data Protection Manager right now, which on EES/Schools Agreement is extremely cheap, and relatively light on server resources (storage excepted, obviously).

My concern is that we'll be paying more for the rest of the suite, which I don't need, and that I'll need to commit a lot more RAM and processor power to it. Even if I don't upgrade, will we still be able to buy annual EES licences for the old versions? Past experience with ILM/FIM suggests it will be difficult, even if its possible at all.

Hello AngryTechnician!
Love your blog.

I think the System Center 2012 suite is just a new way of marketing and licensing the product. Although they do not talk about all the individual products on the website, only about the System Center 2012 "Private Cloud", the download for the 2012 RC is all the individual components. I totally agree that a single pane integrated product would not be ideal, far too much information in one place.

I am not sure what they mean by 2 VMs per license but my guess is they want you to get a beefy server, slap hyper-v on it and then create a VM for each product. Limiting it to only 2 VMs if you go for the standard license - meaning you spread the products across more servers? *shrug*

There is a pdf link at the bottom of the System Center 2012 page which goes some way to try to explain the new licensing model. All sounds a bit confusing to me.


Pricing wise, they are introducing a per processor licensing model. Maybe this will work for some and not others. Cramming all the products onto one dual processor server will keep the costs down but for users that only want a single product this isn't going to do them any favours.

As for the new educational licensing - buying licenses for full-time members of staff rather than individual computers. How does forefront licensing work? If we have only say 50 full-time staff and 50 part-time staff but 400 computers, do we only get to put Endpoint protection on 50 of these machines under the agreement? or do we have to purchase more licenses seperately to cover the number of computers?

Anyway, back to work, first post complete!

The problem @insane101 is how part-time are your part-time staff? If they work more than 200 hours per year (about 6 hours per week term-time) they are full time as far as EES is concerned.

Some are very part-time. But even if we had to license them that figure would still not cover all our computers...

I think it is more an issue for a reseller to pin down.

Looking forward to the new System Center products though. We use quite a lot of the suite currently and are only holding off on installing the others because the new version is due to be released soon. (March? During MMS I think)

The way EES works is that you buy licences for staff, and the number of computers is largely irrelevant. In theory you could have a staff of 10 with 10,000 computers and still install on every computer even though you've only bought 10 licenses. A ridiculous example, but that's how it works.

But under EES you can already buy the System Centre "Pack" which covers all use of the Server Products; and so long as you have gone Enterprise CAL - you are well away :)

I'm just on the verge of purchasing DPM 2010 (Std/Ent) and SCVMM 2008 R2 but with a 1 year SA on the basis that SCVMM 2012 is due by Easter, and DPM 2012 sometime this year.

I've not read the info in-depth, but would that impact my plan in relation to ensuring we will at least get DPM and SCVMM upgraded to the 2012 versions (within our SA period)?

Thanks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheScarfedOne

But under EES you can already buy the System Centre "Pack" which covers all use of the Server Products; and so long as you have gone Enterprise CAL - you are well away :)

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Luckily a category i'm under, question is...not that i'm that bothered as i don't use hyper-V....are EES users free to use the data center version or only licensed under the standard edition?

Will most likely only be using it for SCCM, though if they're all packaged in one i may take a look at other offerings for the fun of it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheScarfedOne

But under EES you can already buy the System Centre "Pack" which covers all use of the Server Products; and so long as you have gone Enterprise CAL - you are well away :)

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How much does that cost? The difficulty for us is that right now we only buy DPM licences (which are per-server). I worry that this will not be available in future and we will have to buy something like this pack, which I suspect is much more expensive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AngryTechnician

How much does that cost? The difficulty for us is that right now we only buy DPM licences (which are per-server). I worry that this will not be available in future and we will have to buy something like this pack, which I suspect is much more expensive.

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System Centre Server Management Suite Data Centre Licence and SA Pack cost us around £30/CPU (licensed as other datacenter products). But that only covers the server ML licenses, with the enterprise cal pack covering most of the client CALs. You do get the full server license of SCVMM thrown in if you buy the SMSD pack, but you still need server licenses for SCCM/SCOM etc. See https://partner.microsoft.com/40107621

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AngryTechnician

How much does that cost? The difficulty for us is that right now we only buy DPM licences (which are per-server). I worry that this will not be available in future and we will have to buy something like this pack, which I suspect is much more expensive.

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EES is something like £50 per FTE (full time equivalent) can't remember exactly but i remember it being somewhere around the region of £50 anyway :)

Covered in the MSVL EES license is your windows licenses, office licenses, exchange CALs, SCCM CALs + software assurance benefits as seen here: Microsoft Volume Licensing - Microsoft Software Assurance Benefits - Frequently Asked Questions to be honest for any large school it's a no brainer in my opinion. :) There may be more or i may have put too much in there as i can't remember the details off the top of my head.

Hopefully i've got the right end of the stick here anyway and no reared off on to something similar...

Hmm interesting... agree with the view above that you might be paying for more than you need. We don't use DPM so don't want to be paying for that and I'm happy with vCenter and ESET for VM and AV respectively.

For me...

App Controller - new?
Configuration Manager - :D you might have noticed I'm a fan
Data Protection Manager - don't use (Veeam)
Endpoint Protection - don't use (ESET)
Operations Manager - have it but needs a bit of work, hope 2012 is easier
Orchestrator - new?
Service Manager - got it this year, great for ITL but not played with it yet
Virtual Machine Manager - happy with vCenter for now but if it's bundled could be worth a look

If it's still silly cheap on EES happy days, will be annoyed if it goes right up but we'll soon find out I guess.

This *should* be a pointless question but I hope it doesn't install as a single suite as that would be very, very silly...

Just found this site fresh up on Microsoft:
Microsoft Volume Licensing - System Center 2012

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gshaw

Orchestrator - new?

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Its the new name for the Opalis range of automation tools that MS bought a couple of years ago. If you license SMSD you got SA rights to use the Opalis suite, but I never did get around to playing with it! Looked quite good if you wanted to automated a load of common tasks or workflows.

jesus, I nearly went absolutely ape...poo when reading that. But then scarfedone's post made me breath the biggest sigh of relief on the planet, having spent 9 months perfecting our plans for going to SCCM 2012 next year. Thankfully it looks as if we'll be covered by the enterprise licensing on our EES agreement - otherwise it's a write off!