Overview
Microsoft System Center 2012 offers unique application management capabilities that can empower you to deliver agile, predictable application services to your business counterparts. Using the App Controller, Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager components of System Center 2012, you can deliver "Applications as a Service"— where a "Service" is a deployed instance of a cloud style application along with its associated configuration and virtual infrastructure.
The preceding figure represents a three-tier service with a front end, middle tier, and back end with the associated virtual infrastructure that hosts it. System Center 2012 offers a service-centric approach to help you manage your application components in the context of the holistic business service that it represents.
System Center 2012 includes the following application management capabilities:
Standardized Application Provisioning
- Virtual Machine Manager offers service templates to help you define standardized application blueprints. A service template would typically include specifications for the hardware, operating system, and application packages that compose the service.
- Support for multiple package types for Microsoft .NET applications, including MS Deploy for web tier (IIS), Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) for application tier, and SQL Server DAC for data tier.
- Specify application configuration requirements like topology, elasticity and scale-out rules, health thresholds, and upgrade rules.
- Server App-V, a unique technology in Virtual Machine Manager, optimizes your applications for private cloud deployments by abstracting the application from the underlying OS and virtual infrastructure. By enabling image-based management, Server App-V simplifies application upgrades and maintenance.
Comprehensive Hybrid Application Management
- App Controller offers your application owners a single view to manage application services and virtual machines, whether they are on-premises, at service providers, or on Windows Azure.
- App Controller provides the ability to deploy and migrate virtual machines to the Windows Azure Virtual Machine service. You can migrate core applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, and Microsoft SharePoint Server from on-premises environments to Windows Azure with just a few simple mouse clicks.
- Extend your on-premises monitoring experience to Windows Azure with the System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure applications.
360-Degree Application Monitoring, Diagnosis, and Dev-Ops
- Operations Manager offers deep application and transaction monitoring insight for .NET applications (and J2EE application servers) and helps you efficiently isolate the root cause of application performance issues down to the offending line of code.
- Outside-in monitoring with Global Service Monitor (GSM) and Operations Manager provides you with real time visibility into application performance as experienced by your end-users.
- Operations Manager and GSM integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio to facilitate dev-ops collaboration, thereby helping you remediate application issues faster.
- Offers easy-to-use reporting and custom dashboarding with Operations Manager.
Benefits
Recognizing that applications power your business, System Center 2012 offers deep application insight that helps you deliver predictable application services.
Simplify Application Delivery through Standardization and Self-Service
- Optimize time-to-market through self-service application provisioning.
- Reduce application deployment errors by introducing consistency and repeatability.
- Deliver operational efficiencies by simplifying application upgrades and maintenance.
Deliver Predictable Application SLA through Deep Application Insight
- Maximize availability and performance for your business critical applications.
- Remediate application issues faster by optimizing “dev-ops” collaboration.
- Effectively track and communicate your application SLAs.
Consistent Application Management across On-Premises, Service Provider, and Windows Azure Environments
- Empower your application owners with a single management view irrespective of where their applications reside.
- Free up on-premises datacenter capacity or ease on-ramp to cloud with application portability from on-premises to Windows Azure.
- Ensure organizational compliance with centralized visibility and control for your IT department.
- Extend familiar on-premises experiences and skills to management of Windows Azure applications.