Azure management services and System Center: What's New in March 2019

In March there have been several news announced by Microsoft on the Azure management services and System Center. In this summary, that we report on a monthly basis, there are listed all the main news, accompanied by the necessary references to be able to conduct further studies.

Azure Monitor

Availability in Central Canada and UK South

The new service that allows you to monitor the virtual machines, called Azure Monitor for VMs, is also available in Central Canada and UK South.

Azure Log Analytics

Availability in new regions

Azure Log Analytics is now available in the regions of Azure China, Australia East and Central Australia. It is also available in Public Preview in the following regions: France Central, Korea Central and North Europe.

Azure Site Recovery

Support for storage accounts protected with firewall rules

In Azure Site Recovery was introduced support for storage accounts that are configured with firewall rules for the Virtual Networks, in replication scenarios from VMware or physical systems to Azure.

Support for managed disks in replication scenarios with VMWare and physical systems

Azure Site Recovery now supports disaster recovery of VMware virtual machines and physical systems, replicating directly towards the managed disks. This avoids creating and managing different storage accounts target for the replica of these systems. The on-premises data are sended to a cache storage account in the target region and written in managed disk by Site Recovery.

New Update Rollup

For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 35 which it addresses several issues and introduces some improvements. The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB 4494485.

Azure Backup

Among the benefits of this solution there are:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes
• Point-in-time restores: to make easy and rapid the recovery operations of the DBs.
• Long-term retention: ability to keep backups for years.
• Protection of encrypted databases: chance to make the backup of encrypted SQL databases and safely keep via an encryption at rest integrated into the solution. All backup and restore operations are managed by role-based access control mechanism.
• Auto-protection: is handled automatically the detection and the protection of new databases.
• Management and monitoring: allows to carry out a centralized management and monitoring the protection status of the systems.
• Cost savings: are not required infrastructure costs and allows to easily scale to meet your needs.

System Center

Released System Center 2019

The main novelty regarding System Center is the release in general availability of the major release of System Center 2019. This is the release belonging to the long term servicing channel (LTSC) that will be supported for 10 years and that introduces full support for Windows Server 2019.

Starting from this release, Microsoft has decided to change the System Center product release policies. There will be no more releases in the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) and new features, before the next release Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), can be obtained via Update Rollup.

System Center 2019 supports upgrade from the two recent Semi-Annual Channel releases (SAC), System Center 1801 and System Center 1807 as well as System Center 2016.

Customers who have a valid license of System Center 2019 can download it from the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC).

Among the main features of System Center 2019 we find:

Virtual Machine Manager

• Integration in VMM with Azure Update Management simplifies patching of virtual machines

• Dynamic Storage Optimization in VMM enables higher availability of workloads
• VMM now provides health and operational status of storage disks in Hyper Converged as well as disaggregated deployment
• New RBAC role in VMM ensures that IT admins can be provided access commensurate with their role and no more
• Support for latest versions of VMware in VMM (to enable migration to Hyper-V)

Operations Manager

• SCOM supports integration with Azure services – Dependency Map (Service Map) provides comprehensive visibility of dependencies across servers along with health.
• Azure Management Pack integrates alerts and performance metrics for Azure resources in SCOM
• Along with modernized and extensible SCOM web console, subscriptions and notifications are now modernized with support for HTML based email
• Maintenance schedules in SCOM with SQL server AlwaysOn
• Update and recommendations for Linux workloads enables discovery of up-to-date MPs for Linux environments
• Linux monitoring is now resilient to SCOM management server failover
• All Windows Server Management Packs now support Windows Server 2019

Data Protection Manager

• Faster backups with DPM with a 75% increase in speed and a monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Log Analytics.
• DPM further supports backup of VMWare VMs including to tape

More news

• Orchestrator supports PowerShellv4 +
• Service Manager has an enhanced AD connector
• Support for service logon across the System Center suite aligning with security best practices

More information about it can be consulted in the article System Center 2019 is now in general availability.

System Center Configuration Manager

Released version 1902 for the Current Branch

There are many new features in this release designed to enrich and improve different features of the solution. To get the complete list of new features introduced with this build, you can consult this official document. The transition to version 1902 can be done by following the installation checklist, at the end of which it is appropriate to continue with the Checklist post-update.

System Center Operations Manager

Management Packs

Following, are reported the news about the SCOM Management Packs:

• System Center Management Pack for Message Queuing version 7.1.10242.0
• System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Stack version 1.0.3.11
• System Center Management Pack for SharePoint Server 2019 version 16.0.11426.3000

Evaluation of Azure and System Center

To test and evaluate free of charge the services offered by Azure you can access this page, while to try the various System Center components you must access theEvaluation Center and, after registering, you can start the trial period.