Ignite Announcements for System Center

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This week Microsoft held its Ignite conference again with lots and lots of news and announcements as always. I wanted to do a post for the readers here about what was said about System Center. I might do another post about Windows Admin Center, since that is on the management space as well. But Let’s focus on System Center for a bit.

System Center 2022

A new version of System Center was announced. It is System Center 2022.

There are currently a number of the products of that release in Preview with an expected release in Q1 2022. I am testing some of this in Preview right now, but I am only going to talk about the items which were talked about at Ignite or before. Focus areas for this release are also:

  • Best in Class Datacenter Operations
  • Manage Heterogenous infrastructure
  • Modernize management with Azure

So, as System Center 2012 and 2012R2 are going out of extended support in July 2022, the newer System Center version is looking at Hybrid management scenario’s as could be expected at this time.

Some generic support items being added to this new release in keeping up with the times are obviously Support for Windows Server 2022 and Azure Stack HCI.

 

SCOM 2022

Some of the items I know are coming in SCOM 2022 were mentioned in the Ignite session, so I will mention them here. Without screenshots and such though.

MS Teams Integration with SCOM

This integration has been talked about before as a nice way to connect the monitoring tool with the work and collaboration tool. Some connectors have also already been built (such as OpsLogix). We will wait and see how far this integration goes and what information is passed through the channel.

Enhanced RBAC capabilities

We are seeing two user roles added to the set. These were mentioned as:

  • Read-Only Administrator. This is for example useful for Auditors, but other cases can also be imagined.
  • Delegated Administrator. This has been an ask for some time where some people do a limited SCOM administrative tasks, but need to be made Full Admin to get to the right screens. The idea is to have a few sets of permissions within the Admin roles and having a possibility to only delegate that or those functions to the delegated admin. Take for example Agent management.

IT Operations Management compliant Alerts Closure

In the old days of SCOM 2007-2016 let’s say, we could close any alert straight from the SCOM alerts pane. This was sometimes seen as a problem if alerts just get closed without looking at them. In the case this was from a monitor, it could be that you end up with no alerts, but state dashboards being red all over. In SCOM 2019 this got changed where you were unable to close an alert from an unhealthy monitor. It just blocked. Going into the Health Explorer you could force a reset Health to green, which would close the alert for you. In the SCOM 2022 version you will get a choice which method to use. Either the SCOM 2019 way of working, or another choice where you can close an alert from an unhealthy monitor, but it would reset the health state in the back-end. So at least you would have the health state and the alert being there or not be consistent. If your disk is still full or your CPU is still burning at full percentage it would generate you a new alert of course within a few minutes. It just depends on the situation. Having the option between these choices gives us the freedom again to manage alerts the way we want to manage them.

Windows Server 2022 support

Obviously this has to be in there. This includes both support to run SCOM2022 on Windows 2022 for the infrastructure, as of course support for the agent running on a Windows Server 2022 to monitor it.

Azure Stack HCI

Support will be included to monitor and manage Azure Stack HCI components with System Center. This includes a set of management packs for SCOM to monitor a set of components related to your AzStackHCI setup, such as the Base OS, Cluster, Hyper-V, SDN and Storage.

Agents support

Added agent support for Ubuntu 20, Debian 10, Oracle Linux 8

That is all I can mention so far 😉

 

DPM 2022

  • Improved Items Level restore
  • Maximum storage limit up to 300 TB
  • VMWare 7.0 support (next to the already included 6.5 and 6.7)
  • Parallel restore of VMWare VM’s (up to 8 as needed)
  • MABS for backup Azure Stack HCI

 

VMM 2022

  • Added management possibilities for Azure Stack HCI
  • Assign IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to SDN managed VMs

 

SCORCH 2022

  • 64 bit support

 

In general

Aside from this obviously there is work being done along the hybrid space a lot. Which are things having to do with connecting Arc, WAC, Azure, Azure Stack HCI and so on.

 

That was it for the main news items around the System Center for Ignite so far, which I heard and can thus share with you in here as well. Everything else needs to wait for another day in the future 🙂

Have a great weekend!

Bob Cornelissen