Microsoft Private Cloud and System Center 2012 announcements

Today Microsoft organized a webcast around the Private Cloud and the System Center products. On this webcast Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Management and Security Division, Microsoft announced the public availability of System Center 2012 Release Candidate. This version can be downloaded here.

Other important announcements from this session are:

• System Center 2012 will be available as a suite, not as single products
• Improved Licensing model for System Center 2012 (More information Below)
• Availability of the Microsoft Customer Assessment tool for Private Cloud (link)
• System Center 2012 will have a Unified Installer to install the products

More information about the Microsoft Private Cloud can be found in the following whitepaper.

System Center 2012 Licensing
System Center 2012 can only be purchased as a bundle. So the various products can't be purchased as a single product. With System Center 2012 there will be 2 bundle options: Datacenter and Standard. Both editions include all the System Center components, the editions are differentiated only by virtualization rights. Both licence editions has the limitation of 2 physical CPU's. See the table from the Microsoft Website:

More informatie can be found in this whitepaper from Microsoft. (link)