Comparing the System Center Suite, with System Center Essentials 2010

By Matt McSpirit - virtualboy. Microsoft Partner Technology Specialist for Virtualization;
http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while, will have noticed an increasing shift towards management technologies, and from a Microsoft perspective, management, is System Center.  The System Center brand however, doesn’t make it particularly easy to choose which technologies apply where, and how to differentiate between each of them!  Do you know your System Center Configuration Manager, from your System Center Operations Manager? How do these compare with System Center Essentials?  Are they aimed at different customer sizes?  If so, what are they?  How do I license these technologies?  Does System Center Essentials include Backup?  If not, do I need Data Protection Manager too?

Well, something that can start to help you down that journey is a blog post by Willemjan van Laarhoven, which compares SCE 2010 (which I blogged about a while back) with some of the larger, more fully fledged technologies like SCOM and SCCM.  It’s not too long a post, but gives you enough info to get started, highlighting some key capabilities that you get in the full SCOM/SCCM/SCVMM, that you wouldn’t get in Essentials, but, at the end of the day, you may not need those capabilities, and SCE 2010 may be an ideal fit.

If you’re interested, take a look at the blog post, and while you’re at it, you may want to take a look at the revamped System Center site, for all the info on the different technologies.