We are thrilled to hear Microsoft has announced System Center 2025, the next release of Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) will be GA (General Availability) in the fall of 2024. This schedule means that System Center 2025 will have updated versions of its System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Service Manager (SM), System Center Orchestrator (SCO), and Data Protection Manager (DPM) by the end of the year.
The admins will also get access to the new Windows Server 2025 too which is also scheduled to become generally available this fall. Public previews for this operating system are already available.
Features
Managing heterogenous infrastructure and workloads
To manage heterogenous infrastructure with a single management plane Microsoft is adding support for management & monitoring of Azure Stack HCI 23H2 clusters with VMM & SCOM 2025. The support for latest versions of Linux distros will be available with the General Availability of SCVMM 2025. DPM 2025 brings the capability to exclude specific disks from backups in Hyper-V environments, offering flexibility and efficiency in data protection strategies. It will integrate seamlessly with SharePoint Subscription Edition and provides virtual TPM (vTPM) support for VMware.
Embrace enhanced security
With the support of Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3, System Center products support the latest version of encryption technology, ensuring that all data transmissions are protected by the latest security standards. One important step is also to reduce the dependency on NTLM and CredSSP for authentication.
Support Infrastructure Modernization
With the General Availability of Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM from November 2023, we will be able to use Azure Management services like Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, etc. to secure, govern, monitor and configure your SCVMM managed VMs through Azure Arc.
Items discontinued
In System Center 2025, the Azure Profiles feature of VMM and System Center Service Provider Foundation (SPF) will be discontinued as these capabilities are now being built into Arc-enabled VMM.
Conclusion
There are previews for VMM and DPM coming, for which you can subscribe for early access.
You can find the official announcement here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/system-center-blog/announcement-system-center-2025-is-here/ba-p/4138510
Of course, we will be early testers of the SCOM 2025 preview, and be prepared for it in our training content, health checks, webinars, and more.