Great news we now have beta version that we can test and provide feedback. From what I hear is that RTM could be available before end of the year or early next year. The downloads are located here. Some of the new features are:
- 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
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 