Microsoft System Center 2012 is a comprehensive IT infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud management platform. With System Center 2012, you can more easily and efficiently manage your applications and services across multiple hypervisors as well as across public and private cloud infrastructures to deliver flexible and cost-effective IT services for your business.

System Center 2012 provides a unified management toolset for your applications and services – enabling productive infrastructure, predictable applications, and cloud computing on your terms. Further, System Center 2012 offers deep application insight combined with a service-centric approach to ensure your applications run smoothly. Automation. Self-service. Application insight. It's all included with System Center 2012.

Overview

Cloud computing is transforming the way enterprises provide and consume IT services with the promise of more productive infrastructure and more predictable applications.

System Center 2012 delivers on this promise by enabling your enterprise to benefit from both private and public cloud computing while still supporting your unique business needs. It helps organize your IT assets – network, storage, compute – into a hybrid cloud model spanning the private cloud and public cloud services from a single console view.

Discover System Center 2012

Productive Infrastructure

System Center 2012 helps you deliver flexible and cost effective infrastructure using what you already know and own.

Heterogeneous Support

System Center 2012 offers integrated management for your heterogeneous environments. You can manage multiple hypervisors including Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix; monitor multiple operating systems including Unix/Linux; and interoperate with management toolsets from VMware, HP, CA, IBM, and BMC.

Process Automation

System Center 2012 helps you simplify and standardize your datacenter processes with its flexible automation platform. By automating repetitive tasks, you can drive down costs and improve service reliability. Your IT staff can focus their time on doing more impactful things for your business.

Self-Service Infrastructure

System Center 2012 can help you pool and abstract your datacenter resources into a private cloud infrastructure fabric. Your application owners can then request private cloud capacity using a self-service catalog.

Predictable Applications
Applications power your business. Deliver predictable application service levels with deep application insight.

Deep Application Monitoring and Diagnosis

System Center 2012 offers deep performance and transaction monitoring insight for .NET applications. This enables you to efficiently work with your application development counterpart and reduce the time to resolve critical issues thereby optimizing application health.

Comprehensive Application Manageability

Through Microsoft Server Application Virtualization technology, System Center 2012 enables you to abstract applications from the underlying infrastructure. This helps simplify how you upgrade and maintain your applications thereby reducing administrative effort.

Service-Centric Approach

System Center 2012 can help you manage the application lifecycle in the context of the holistic service that it represents to the business. Through innovative technology like service templates, you can standardize how applications are composed and deployed, thereby saving time and reducing the chance of errors.

Your Cloud

Private and public cloud computing on your terms managed with a common toolset.

Flexibility with Delegation and Control

System Center 2012 provides the flexibility to construct and manage across private and public clouds. You have full control across these environments. At the same time, you can delegate authority to your application owners to enable self-service.

Application Self-Service across Clouds

System Center 2012 provides a common console across private and public clouds that empowers application owners to easily build, configure, deploy, and manage new services. You can also use your existing System Center investments to monitor Windows Azure applications.

Physical, Virtual, and Cloud Management

As hybrid IT environments become the norm, you can manage your physical, virtual, private cloud, and public cloud investments with System Center 2012 to optimize ROI.

Capabilities Overview

Microsoft System Center 2012 provides an integrated management platform with a robust set of capabilities. View the picture below to learn more about the capabilities of System Center 2012 and how the product components align.

Key Capabilities

Application Management

Overview

Microsoft System Center 2012 offers unique application management capabilities that can empower you to deliver agile, predictable application services to your business counterparts. System Center 2012 enables the concept of "Application as a Service"—where a "Service" is a deployed instance of a cloud style application along with its associated configuration and virtual infrastructure.

The preceding figure represents a three-tier service with a front end, middle tier, and back end with the associated virtual infrastructure that hosts it. System Center 2012 offers a service-centric approach to help you manage your application components in the context of the holistic business service that it represents.

System Center 2012 includes the following application management capabilities:

Standardized Application Provisioning

Utilize service templates to define standardized application blueprints for your private cloud. A service template would typically include specifications for the hardware, operating system, and application packages that compose the service.
Support for multiple package types for Microsoft .NET applications, including MS Deploy for web tier (IIS), Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) for application tier, and SQL Server DAC for data tier.
Specify application configuration requirements like topology, elasticity and scale-out rules, health thresholds, and upgrade rules.
Provides a self-service experience to trigger “one click” application deployment.

Comprehensive Application Manageability

Server App-V, a unique technology in System Center 2012, offers the following capabilities:

Optimizes your applications for private-cloud deployments by abstracting the application from the underlying OS and virtual infrastructure.
Enable image-based management, which helps simplify application upgrades and reduce your application maintenance costs.

Deep Application Diagnostics and Insight

Offers deep application and transaction monitoring insight for .NET applications (and J2EE application server health).
Helps you efficiently isolate the root cause of application performance issues down to the offending line of code.
Integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio to unlock dev-ops collaboration, thereby helping you remediate application issues faster.
Offers easy-to-use reporting and custom dash-boarding.

Common Application Management for Hybrid Models

Offers your application owners with a single view to manage their application services across traditional, private and public clouds.
Extend your on-premises monitoring experience to the public cloud with the System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure applications.

Benefits

Recognizing that applications power your business, System Center 2012 offers deep application insight that helps you deliver predictable application services.

Simplify Application Delivery through Standardization and Self-Service

Enable your business to optimize time-to-market through self-service application provisioning.
Reduce application deployment errors by introducing consistency and repeatability.
Deliver operational efficiencies by simplifying application upgrades.

Deliver Predictable Application SLA through Deep Application Insight

Maximize availability and performance for your business critical applications.
Optimize “dev-ops” collaboration with deep application diagnostics and collaborative tools.
Effectively track and communicate your application SLAs.

Common Application Management Experiences across Private and Public Clouds

Empower your application owners with a single view to manage across private and public clouds.
Ensure organizational compliance by providing your IT organization with centralized visibility and control.
Extend familiar on-premise experiences and skills to management of public cloud applications on Windows Azure.
Optimize ROI by leveraging a single management toolset across your physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Service Delivery and Automation

Overview

System Center 2012 helps you simplify and standardize your datacenter with flexible service delivery and automation. With System Center 2012, you can automate core organizational process workflows like incident management, problem management, change management, and release management. You can also integrate and extend your existing toolsets and build flexible workflows (or runbooks) to automate processes across your IT assets and organizations.

System Center 2012 delivers the following service delivery and automation capabilities:

Standardize Services Provided to IT Service Consumers

Define service offerings available for request by leveraging dependencies in central management data base (CMDB) to publish standardized service offerings.
Ensure compliance with pertinent industry regulations and business needs.
Identify approval processes and workflows to fulfill service requests.

Empower Consumers of IT Services with the Ability to Identify, Access and Request Services

Provide easy navigation with intuitive interface.
Deliver services based upon service consumer roles.
Ensure capture and tracking of required service request information.

Automate Service Processes and Systems Necessary to Fulfill IT Service Consumer Requests

Automate routing of requests for approval and notification.
Automate provisioning of service requests for end-to-end request fulfillment.
Integrate automation across System Center and third-party management components.

Benefits

By automating repetitive tasks and standardizing services and configuration, you can lower your costs and improve service reliability.

Lower Costs and Improve Predictability through Standardization and Automation

Enable IT resources to focus on work that adds business value.
Reduce time to delivery and improve predictability by reducing error-prone manual activities.
Desired configuration management with automated remediation.

Deliver Scalable and Reliable Datacenter Services through Orchestrated Workflows

Accelerate your time to value with flexible process workflows.
Improve service reliability across multiple tools, systems, and departments.

Optimize and Extend Existing Investments through Integration

Integrate with Third Party management tools through Orchestrator Integration Packs.
Centralize collection and reporting for datacenter assets.
Optimize heterogeneous environments with integrated management.

Infrastructure Management

Overview

Microsoft System Center 2012 provides a common management toolset to help you configure, provision, monitor, and operate your IT infrastructure. If your infrastructure is like that of most organizations, you have physical and virtual resources running heterogeneous operating systems. The integrated physical, virtual, private, and public cloud management capabilities in System Center 2012 can help you ensure efficient IT management and optimized ROI of those resources.

System Center 2012 delivers the following infrastructure management capabilities:

Provision your Physical and Virtual Infrastructure

Support deployment and configuration of virtual servers and Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager.
Manage VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer using one interface.
Automatically deploy Hyper-V to bare metal servers and create Hyper-V clusters.
Provision everything from operating systems to physical servers, patches, and endpoint protection with Configuration Manager.

Provision Private Clouds

Use "create cloud" functionality in Virtual Machine Manager to aggregate virtual resources running on Hyper-V, vSphere, and XenServer into a unified private cloud fabric.
Customize and assign private cloud resources to suit your organization’s needs.
Deliver self-service capability for application owners to request and automate provisioning of new private cloud resources.

Operate Your Infrastructure

Leverage a single console and customizable dashboards in Operations Manager to monitor and manage your physical, virtual, networking, application, and cloud resources.
Dynamically optimize virtual resources for load balancing and power efficiency.
Protect your physical and virtual resources with Endpoint Protection and Data Protection Manager.
Automatically patch your physical and virtual resources with Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager.
Automatically track and create custom reports for hardware inventory, software inventory, and software usage metering.

Benefits

Unified Management of Existing Infrastructure Investments

Consolidate your virtual resources with a single management solution for Hyper-V, VMware and Citrix virtual machines.
Leverage integrated views and management across your Windows and Linux/Unix-based operating system environments.
Improve network health and availability with central management of your diverse set of network hardware devices.

Improved Utilization of Existing Infrastructure

Pool and abstract your data center resources (compute, network, and storage) into dedicated private cloud fabric.
Flexibly scale virtual and cloud resources up or down, as needed.
Reduce infrastructure costs with automated power management.

Simplified Management with Process Automation and Standardization

Improve infrastructure availability with automated remediation of errors or alerts.
Speed up provisioning of new infrastructure resources with automated service catalog requests.
Provide controlled delegation of routine infrastructure provisioning and management tasks.

Benefits

Microsoft System Center 2012 transforms the way you deliver IT and application services to your organization, optimizing resources across your public and private clouds, all managed from a single console view.

By optimizing your existing IT infrastructure with System Center 2012, you can realize the following benefits:

Hybrid Cloud Management

System Center 2012 offers a single tool set with integrated physical, virtual, private cloud, and public cloud management to help you increase operational efficiency and optimize ROI at any point in your cloud computing journey. With System Center 2012, you can construct and manage clouds across multiple data center infrastructures and service providers. You can provide delegated authority to empower your application owners with a common self-service experience to manage their application services across private clouds and public clouds – even as IT retains centralized visibility and control to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements.

Deep Application Insights

System Center 2012 follows a service centric approach and helps you manage your application components in the context of the holistic service that it represents to the business. System Center 2012 offers deep application and transaction monitoring insight for .NET applications and J2EE application server health to maximize availability and performance. Microsoft Server Application Virtualization, a feature of System Center 2012, optimizes your applications for private cloud deployments by abstracting applications from their underlying infrastructure.

Flexible and Cost-Effective Infrastructure

To help you extend your existing data center investments and skillsets, System Center 2012 offers integration and interoperability for your heterogeneous data center environments, including multi-hypervisor management, cross platform monitoring, and integrated automation across management tool sets from multiple vendors. You can automate repetitive tasks to help drive down your costs and improve service reliability. You can pool and abstract your data center resources – compute, network, and storage – into a private cloud infrastructure fabric and delegate this fabric to your business units' IT organizations in a flexible yet controlled manner. Application owners can request capacity in a self-service mode through a standardized service catalog.

Better Economics than VMware

System Center 2012 provides a unified solution and simplifies the number of product editions to two (Standard and Data center). And because System Center 2012 Data center licensing covers unlimited virtual machines, you can continually increase your VM density without additional licensing costs for visualizing infrastructure and applications. Our analysis shows that a VMware private cloud solution can cost from five to sixteen times more than a comparable Microsoft private cloud solution over a period of one to three years.

Try It

Begin Your Evaluation

Try out the Microsoft System Center 2012 cloud and data center management solution that includes App Controller, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Endpoint Protection, Orchestrator, Operations Manager, Service Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager.

Software Download

Trial Software

Download all System Center 2012 components in one convenient package as part of the Microsoft private cloud evaluation. System Center 2012 helps your organization achieve IT as a Service by enabling productive infrastructure, predictable applications, and cloud computing with a common management toolset.

Download the Trial

Other Ways to Try System Center 2012

When you want to experience the software prior to downloading it, guided labs and virtual labs provide you with the opportunity to test-drive new and improved features and functionality without the complexity or time investment of setup or installation.

What Is Microsoft System Center? See The Video