System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta Available

Updated documentation has been popping up on TechNet the last couple of days and now the downloads for SP1 Beta for System Center 2012 has turned up.

Before you go running off to install, remember this is Beta software and is not supported for production use unless working with Microsoft on the TAP program.

The main SP1 download can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34607

This contains the updates for:
SC2012 ConfigMgr & EndPoint Protection - 377.3 MB

SC2012 App Controller - 15.1 MB

SC2012 Data Protection Manager Part 1 - 818.6 MB

SC2012 Data Protection Manager Part 2 - 1.5 GB

SC2012 Orchestrator - 68.6 MB

SC2012 Operations Manager - 905.9 MB

SC2012 Service Manager - 400.2 MB

SC2012 Virtual Machine Manager - 756.4 MB

N.B. Both parts for DPM are required, download and extract to the same folder before running setup

There are also additional ConfigMgr clients for more Operating Systems to be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34609

• AIX Version 7.1 (Power)
• AIX Version 6.1 (Power)
• AIX Version 5.3 (Power)
• HP-UX Version 11iv3 (IA64 & PA-RISC)
• HP-UX Version 11iv2 (IA64 & PA-RISC)
• RHEL Version 6 (x86 & x64)
• RHEL Version 5 (x86 & x64)
• RHEL Version 4 (x86 & x64)
• Solaris Version 10 (x86 & SPARC)
• Solaris Version 9 (SPARC)
• SLES Version 11 (x86 & x64)
• SLES Version 10 SP1 (x86 & x64)
• SLES Version 9 (x86)

 There are also some more SP1 Beta Integration Packs for Orchestrator:

• HP Operations Manager
• HP Service Manager
• VMware vSphere

Brief summary of Service Pack 1 features from the download page:

Virtual Machine Manager

• Improved Support for Network Virtualization
• Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
• Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
• Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image

Configuration Manager

• Deployment and management of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
• Distribution point for Windows Azure to help reduce infrastructure costs
• Automation of administrative tasks through PowerShell support
• Management of Mac OS X clients and Linux and UNIX servers
• Real-time administrative actions for Endpoint Protection related tasks

Data Protection Manager

• Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
• Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
• Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
• Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration

App Controller

• Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
• Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center

Operations Manager

• Support for IIS 8
• Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
• Azure SDK support

Orchestrator

• Support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
• Manage VMM self-service User Roles
• Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
• Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds

Service Manager

• Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
• Create chargeback reports
• Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets

Server App-V

• Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
• Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server