Review: System Center Essentials 2010

A bundling together of the best bits from Microsoft’s System Center family of enterprise management tools, System Center Essentials is aimed at mid-sized companies (up to 500 users) looking to manage their Windows networks. It was first released a couple of year ago, unfortunately just before virtualisation took a grip on the market. So now there’s a new release – System Center Essentials 2010 – which, among other enhancements, lets you manage virtual as well as physical resources from the same, integrated, console.

Getting started with Essentials
Installing Essentials 2010 took a lot longer than we expected as, despite being a cut-down implementation of the full System Center portfolio, there’s still a lot to it. Indeed the final release candidate we tested came as four disk images, totalling just over 5GB and taking the best part of a day to set up.

One or more servers are required to host the various components, running Windows Server 2003 or later. The main management server can be 32-bit if wanted but we opted for the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 platform - which was just as well, as in order to fully implement the new virtualisation option a Hyper-V hypervisor is required. This can be on a separate host if wanted but we simply installed the optional Hyper-V role on our 2008 R2 server.

SQL Server and Microsoft’s .Net framework are also required before the Essentials software can be installed and with the previous version you had to stop the setup and configure these separately before proceeding. With the 2010 implementation, however, they can be installed as part of the procedure, making setup a lot less of a hassle.

Likewise, attention has been paid to the time and space required to load the supporting management packs. These tell Essentials how to monitor different platforms and applications, how to interpret and deal with error conditions and so on. With Essentials 2007 you got all the packs going regardless of what servers or applications you actually had. With the 2010 release, however, only those relevant to your setup are installed, with post installation wizards recommending what you should be managing and helping to install both the management packs and the agents required for the product to function.

The end result is a much shorter, slicker install and we certainly found Essentials 2010 far less stressful to install. We also found it easier to add new servers and workstations later on and delete those no longer required, thanks to the availability of dynamic groups where systems can be added or removed automatically according to pre-set parameters. New management packs are, similarly, much easier to identify and import in this release with enhanced facilities to keep the packs updated.

Essentials in action
Once up and running we found Essentials 2010 a lot nicer to work with compared to the previous 2007 release. Mainly because of to the re-designed console which features an Outlook inspired interface with more comprehensive overview panes plus separate workspaces for the various tool sets, each with its own tasks, reports and help sources.

On the downside it took some time to get to grips with the product and a fair amount of technical expertise plus an understanding of what the product can do. That said, we found the new interface consistent and easy to navigate with wizards implemented throughout which, although irksome for experienced network managers, are a godsend for those who only spend part of their time on IT matters. We also found the product as a whole more responsive than its predecessor, although that could have been subjective and overall performance will be down to hardware resources.

In terms of functionality, virtualisation support is the most obvious of the new features and it was good to find it seamlessly integrated, with virtual machines listed and managed alongside their physical counterparts. Despite which there’s no lack of options with more or less the same set of tools available in Essentials 2010 as in the latest R2 release of the full System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) product, right down to support for live migration of VMs to allow for maintenance and load balancing.

On the downside there’s no live migration without Hyper-V and you can’t manage VMware servers from Essentials like you can with the SCVMM product. However, you can manage Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2 hosts and import VMs from this platform as well as those built for Hyper-V. We were also able to convert a VMware VM to run on our Hyper-V host and do a physical to virtual (P2V) conversion, all from the Essentials 2010 console.

Following the approach taken throughout the product, wizards are on hand to simplify such tasks and also to help with the building of new VMs. Customisable templates are similarly available plus a neat option, referred to as Performance and Resource Optimisation (PRO), to recommend the servers best equipped to handle your VMs depending on the resources it needs. We only had the one host so our choices were somewhat limited, but on a larger network with several, we could see this being very useful indeed.

More than virtual
Of course there’s a lot more besides virtualisation in Essentials 2010. There’s server and application monitoring, based on System Center Operation Manager technology and an implementation of Configuration Manager (still referred to by many as SMS) for inventory management and software distribution. These too get few enhancements, as do the Windows Server Update System (WSUS) based update management tools, which get tweaks to better target updates, meet deadlines for distribution and generally help automate the patching process.

There’s a lot to like and we really warmed to the new Essentials product, which more than lived up to our expectations. That aside, we did have a few reservations, such as only being able to manage Windows systems, which could be an issue in a mixed Windows/Linux environment - increasingly commonplace in the mid-size market. Support for VMware and Xen servers would be nice too. Plus it’s unlikely to be a cheap solution.

At the time of writing pricing had yet to be announced – the product is scheduled to ship in Q2 - but we would expect it to follow the existing licensing model, which tends to favour larger rather than smaller deployments. Still, that’s to be expected and you only get what you pay for which, with System Center Essentials 2010, is quite a lot.

Management server requires 2.0Ghz processor or faster, 2GB RAM and 12GB of disk space
Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) recommended (Standard or Enterprise Edition). Hyper-V required for virtualisation support
Windows Server 2003 with SP2 supported (x86 or x64) with limited virtualisation functionality
Active Directory domain required on network
SQL Server required (bundled)