Wednesday 29 February 2012

Configuration Manager 2012 Licensing

I went to the System Center 2012 Preview Roadshow in Edinburgh yesterday. Sadly, this wasn't one of Microsoft's best events (it was pretty awful), but there was one bit of information they presented that I hadn't noticed before.

There are some big changes with the way the System Center products are licensed with the 2012 release. Gone are the days when you could licence Operations Manager or Configuration Manager separately. All the products are bundled together and there are only two options for licensing now-
  • System Center 2012 Datacenter Edition
  • System Center 2012 Standard Edition
Both products give you the entire System Center suite - Operations Manager, Config Manager, DPM, VMM, Service Manager, Forefront Endpoint Protection and the two new guys Orchestrator (formerly Opalis) and App Controller (formerly project Concero). The only difference (apart from price) is that the Datacenter edition allows you to install as many virtual machines as you want on a two core server - the Standard edition is stuck at two VMs.

On the client side, the Core CAL will still give you ConfigMgr and Forefront Endpoint Protection. The Enterprise CAL adds DPM, OpsMgr, Orchestrator and Service Manager.

No comments: