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.