- What Is System Center?
- Understanding System Center Configuration Manager
- Understanding System Center Operations Manager
- Understanding System Center Data Protection Manager
- Understanding System Center Virtual Machine Manager
- Understanding System Center Service Manager
- Understanding System Center Capacity Planner
- Understanding System Center Mobile Device Manager
- Understanding System Center Essentials
- Understanding System Center Licensing
- Summary
- Best Practices
Summary
This first chapter of the book was intended to provide you, the reader, with a background of the various System Center products available, how the products fit into the management scheme of an organization, and what to expect in the subsequent chapters in this book.
Overall, the life cycle in an enterprise has a system operating system deployed on a system using System Center Configuration Manager that also patches and updates the system and keeps the system in a standardized configuration. The System Center Operations Manager product then monitors the system, whether a server or a client system, and proactively alerts administrators of any pending problems.
The System Center Data Protection Manager backs up server and application data and provides the ability for the administrator or even an end user to recover information based on as little as 15-minute increments of time. In addition, the System Center Virtual Machine Manager product helps to manage physical and virtual server systems, including the conversion of physical systems to virtual guest sessions as well as intelligently placing guest sessions on physical servers with the most available capacity.
The overall tool that helps an organization manage their environment is the System Center Service Manager that provides incident management, change control, and consolidated reporting for servers and client systems within the environment.
Enterprises that do proactive planning and modeling can leverage the System Center Capacity Planner tool, and those organizations with mobile devices can inventory, control, provision, and deprovision mobile devices with the System Center Mobile Device Manager product.
Finally, for smaller organizations that want the key capabilities available in the System Center family of products but really only need the most common features used in organizations, they can get the System Center Essentials product. System Center Essentials provides patching, updating, monitoring, alerting, and virtual system management for organizations with fewer than 500 users and fewer than 50 servers.
All of these tools are available to be purchased individually or are bundled in suites and can be purchased together. The focus of this book is to help you, the reader, better understand not only what the products are, but how the products tie together so that you can develop an overall strategy for managing and administering your servers and client systems throughout your enterprise.