System Center 2019 is released on 1 March 2019. It is available as a new license or to customers with active Software Assurance. Here we will highlight some of the changes, improvements and new features in System Center 2019.

The changes and improvements in the 2019 release will focus on these three key areas:

  1. First choice for Datacenter Management
  2. Ability to manage the new features and functionality within Windows Server 2019
  3. Integration with Azure

System Center 2019 is the next Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release of System Center. Some of the changes below are already available within the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) but are all new to the LTSC release of System Center.

New features in System Center 2019:

Virtual Machine Manager

  • Storage Optimisation – adding the ability to optimise storage for capacity.
  • Added Storage Health – added health status and operations status reporting, ability to upgrade and patch S2D cluster using VMM.
  • Added VM Admin Role – can migrate a VM or VM storage and has visibility into datacentre fabric but cannot perform any administrative actions to the fabric.
  • Network Troubleshooting – providing Host layer 2 network information allows you to troubleshoot network issues within VMM environment.
  • Added ability to configure L3 gateway
  • Migrate UEFI VMware VM to Hyper-V Gen 2 VM
  • Hybrid – augment VMM environment with Azure hybrid environment – patch on-premise VMs with Azure Update Management.

Operations Manager

  • Introducing HTML5 dashboards – no Silverlight dependency, console, and dashboards now on HTML5 and can be accessed from various browsers.
  • Notification and subscription enhancement – improve the communication of issues to administrators via email – can remediate issues within the dashboard.
  • Alert Management – operators cannot close alerts if the corresponding monitor is still unhealthy. New dashboard to monitor such alerts.
  • Linux/UNIX monitoring enhancements – removed duplicate alerts for Linux/UNIX failovers.
  • Updates and Recommendations for Linux workloads – Enabled recommendations for Linux and third-party workloads.
  • Linux log file monitoring – Enhanced ability to monitor any data source including Linux and generate alerts.
  • Azure Management Pack – Manage your on-premise and Azure assets from within SCOM.

Data Protection Manager

  • Support for VMware backup to tape
  • Backup storage improvements – reduce storage requirements for backups. Increased reliability and latency for backups.
  • Greater flexibility to recover from Azure
  • Greater reporting and monitoring from Azure

Orchestrator

  • Adding 64-bit support
  • Adding PowerShell v4 + support
  • Adding Support for TLS1.2
  • Adding support for SQL 2017

Service Manager

  • Improved UI responsiveness
  • AD connector improvement
  • Adding Support for TLS1.2
  • Adding support for SQL 2017

Considering an upgrade to System Center 2019?

Trustmarque’s Datacenter Consultancy service assists customers who are making both software and hardware changes to on-premise, hybrid or cloud datacenters. We help to assess, design, deploy and support allowing customers to create a cost-effective data centre model that works for each and every requirement. For more information please contact your Trustmarque Account Manager or email [email protected]

By Tom McEwing.

Tom is one of our Microsoft Licensing Specialists who advises our customers on how to get the most from their Microsoft volume licensing and contracts.