Microsoft Aims to Simplify System Center 2012 Licensing

[Thank you to regular reader ‘Niall’ who kindly contributed this article ]

Last week Microsoft released details regarding licensing changes for System Center 2012.

Companies that are considering any growth or expansion of their existing system management products should be seriously considering taking action prior to the release of System Center 2012, due to some potentially favorable conversions between the current System Center offerings and the 2012 versions.

Rather than having a suite of individual products, all System Center products are being rolled up into one product line with two editions; so SCCM, SCOM, DPM VMM and the others will all be rolled up into System Center 2012, with Standard and Datacenter editions.

Licensing is being “simplified” through processor based licensing for all Server MLs, rather than a mix of per server and per CPU licensing. Clients can still opt to be licensed per user or per OSE.

Further details:

• http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/default.aspx
• http://richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/system-center-2012-licensing-changes/
• http://tonymackelworth.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/system-center-2012-licensing-update/
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/1/1/11128EC7-2BE7-480C-9D46-4ECECA9E481A/System%20Center%202012%20Licensing%20Datasheet.pdf

The big thing to note here is the conversion methodology; each ML you currently have for SCCM, SCOM and DPM will each convert into one license for the entire new product. To put this in perspective the pricing quoted by MS at the moment is $1,323 for a standard license, and $3,615 for a Datacentre license with SA over 2 years. The comparable pricing for a SCOM or SCCM ML is $236 for a license with one years SA. (Open, No Level pricing)

Any company thinking about deploying or expanding their System Center usage should start talking to their LAR or Microsoft account manager pretty soon to make sure they make the most of the opportunity.

[Thank you to regular reader ‘Niall’ who kindly contributed this article.]