OMS and System Center: What's New in July 2017

We inaugurate a new series of articles that will be published on a monthly basis and that will reflect the main changes, updates and information released within the last month about System Center and Operations Management Suite (OMS). It will be a summary accompanied by references for any insights.

Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Agent

Released the updated version of the OMS agent for Linux systems that solved some bugs and introduced some new features useful to extend the capabilities of OMS: OMS Agent for Linux GA v 1.4.0-12.

Figure 1 – Bug fixes and what's new for the OMS agent for Linux

Protection and Disaster Recovery

In Azure Backup introduced the ability to instant recovery of files and folders using the VM backup Azure. This feature is available for both Windows and Linux virtual machines and allows you to act quickly without having to restore the entire VM to retrieve only certain items: Instant File Recovery from Azure VM backups is now generally available.

Figure 2 – Instant File Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) introduced support for disks of size up to 4095 GB in disaster recovery scenarios and migrating virtual machines and physical systems on-premises to Azure: Azure Site Recovery now supports large disk sizes in Azure.
Using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) with replication scenarios between different datacenter Azure was included support for virtual machines with Windows Server 2016 and for configurations Storage Spaces: Azure Site Recovery support for Storage Spaces and Windows Server 2016.

System Center

System Center Configuration Manager

Released the version 1706 for the Current Branch (CB) of System Center Configuration Manager that introduces new features and major improvements in the product.

Among the various new products made by this update mainly these issues emerge:

Ability to manage driver updates for Microsoft Surface.
Improving the user experience for Office updates 365.
Added the ability in hardware inventory to collect information about how to enable the SecureBoot and ownership of the TPM.
Important new capabilities in mobile device management in SCCM architectures associated with Microsoft Intune.

For more details about it you can see the article: Now Available: Update 1706 for System Center Configuration Manager.

The update will be available starting from the coming weeks and it will appear a notification on node "Updates and Servicing" the SCCM console when it was performed on automatic download. To force the update you can use this PowerShell script.

Released the version 1707 for the Technical Preview branch of System Center Configuration Manager: Update 1707 for Configuration Manager Technical Preview Branch – Available Now! In the Technical Preview releases Branch help you evaluate the new features of SCCM and it is recommended to apply these updates only in test environments.

If you try to install a new Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) in Configuration Manager current branch version 1702 You may not be able to complete provisioning. In this regard has been released the hotfix described in KB 403015 (Provisioning not completed when creating a Cloud Management Gateway in System Center Configuration Manager version 1702).

System Center Operations Manager

Several SCOM Management Pack 2016 We released a new updated version: