Microsoft Enhances System Center For Hybrid Cloud WorkMicrosoft Enhances System Center For Hybrid Cloud Work

Microsoft upgraded its System Center suite Tuesday to make it a hybrid cloud manager and a more complete manager of the capabilities included in Windows Server 2012, launched last September.

As System Center 2012 and Windows Server 2012 mesh more tightly together, Microsoft has achieved what it refers to as its "Cloud Operating System," in the words of Michael Park, corporate VP for server and tools business marketing, in an interview. The term means mainly that System Center can now scale across many Windows Server 2012 servers, and link up operations that may be scattered across more than one data center.

System Center 2012 was augmented Tuesday with Service Pack 1. It's been extended so that a single instance of System Center's Virtual Machine Manager module can handle up to 8,000 virtual machines on a cluster with 64 hosts. Add another Virtual Machine Manager instance and manage another 8,000 VMs.

The combination of System Center with SP1 and Windows Server 2012 allows an IT administrator to create Hyper-V virtual machines and deploy them to his own data center, a remote hosting service provider or a public cloud, such as a Windows Azure site.

If the hosting service provider is one of 14,000 that has equipped itself with its own version of System Center, then the enterprise IT manager will be able to see any type of workload -- on-premises, in a hosting service provider's data center or in the Windows Azure cloud -- from a single System Center console. That's because Microsoft supplies Service Provider Foundation as part of the hosting provider's version, and it includes an API that lets an on-premises system call to a service provider system to gain a view of a particular running workload.

[ Microsoft previously upgraded System Center for the cloud era. See Microsoft System Center 2012 Focuses On Private Cloud. ]

"System Center can be the glue that brings it all together for the customer," said Mike Schutz, general manager of server and tools business marketing, in an interview. Microsoft has previously talked up some of the capabilities now included in Service Pack 1. "This release puts an exclamation point on them," he added.

System Center is a suite of eight management modules. Virtual Machine Manager for generating and deploying virtual machines is one; Configuration Manager for capturing the specifications of each server is another. Originally designed to manage Windows Server, it has been extended to also manage several versions of Linux, Oracle Solaris and HP/UX.

Windows Server 2012 included a new version of Hyper-V that could generate a virtualized network on top of a physical network. The capability is essential to using automated processes to provision and manage virtual machines, and it was Microsoft's own step toward creating what rival VMware refers to as the software-defined data center.

But Microsoft has waited until now to give System Center the ability to use Hyper-V virtual networking capabilities. With Service Pack 1, network provisioning allows a newly created virtual machine to be assigned a virtual subnet and virtual routing, defined in System Center policies. The capability brings more automation and flexibility to managing the virtual data center under Hyper-V. Another new SP1 feature is the integration of System Center's Configuration Manager module with Windows Intune, its system for managing end-user devices. With this release, Configuration Manager has been extended to recognize and manage Windows 8 tablets, PCs and smartphones, as well as Apple iOS iPads and iPhones and Android smartphones.

Through the System Center console, an IT manager can supervise the creation of Hyper-V virtual servers, assign them virtual networking and virtual storage, or set templates that mass produce similar virtual servers on a larger scale.

In addition, Microsoft has added Global Service Monitor, a new online monitoring service built up in its Windows Azure cloud data centers around the world. Microsoft maintains 15 points of presence -- active servers ready to act as end users querying a website -- to launch automated queries at a customer's website and report the website's response times to its owner. That gives users an "outside-in view" of how their website is performing to customers, said Schutz.

This type of global service is just emerging. CA Technologies offers its own service with 77 points, while Compuware (after its Gomez purchase) offers a monitoring service with thousands of points. The more the better, because website users come from around the world and response times can vary widely, depending on where the user is located. More points offer more accurate feedback.

Schutz conceded the service was still young but said Microsoft's advantage in launching it is that it is integrated with the System Center management console, as opposed to a point solution's separate console.

Schutz and Park staged a Webcast Tuesday to announce the added features. It included Alan Bourassa, CIO of Empire CLS, a ground freight transport firm with a presence in 650 cities. Bourassa said Empire runs three data centers around the world that are each 90% virtualized through System Center. It extends its freight system as a service to local haulers, augmenting its core business with a growing software-as-a-service business.

Bourassa said his IT staff has been able to offer "seven nines (99.99999%) of uptime, unheard of before in our industry," through its reliance on System Center. He said his firm considered VMware as it built out its virtualized data centers but found it could more easily capitalize on its Windows Server administrator experience through Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager.

"VMware was a hypervisor virtualization play only. It didn't have the end-to-end solution that we needed for our purposes," he said.

VMware is anything but a hypervisor-only company. Its software-defined data center concepts and advanced work on virtualized networking are the footsteps Microsoft is following in launching System Center 2012 with Service Pack 1. But it's clear also that Microsoft is matching important features of the VMware environment as it keeps improving its core Windows Server and System Center platform -- the so-called cloud OS.