What’s The Big Deal With Hyper-V and System Center?
Aidan Finn: Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management. Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management. They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center. For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites. When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation. Sounds like science fiction? Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route. Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005. Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops. That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment. That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day? Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.(continue at source)
| 21 Jun '09 - 13:52 | | news source ~ Aidan Finn 
Aidan Finn: Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management. Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management. They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center. For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites. When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation. Sounds like science fiction? Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route. Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005. Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops. That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment. That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day? Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.(continue at source)