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!
