Microsoft today announced the General Availability of the newest versions of its Operating Systems Windows, both Windows 8.1 for clients and Windows Server 2012 R2 are now available for download after Microsoft released them on August 27th this year. Both Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 were made available earlier for its Technet and MSDN subscribers as reported by cloudcomputing.info in September.
Now the product suite to also manage these new Operating Systems; System Center 2012 R2 is also available to download from Technet, MSDN and all the other channels available for customers and partners.
Some links detailing all the new functionality:
Windows Server 2012 R2:
System Center 2012 R2:
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 App Contoller
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Orchestrator
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager
- What’s new in System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager
Microsoft isn’t putting any effort in further developing the Unified Installer it seems, since no update was provided. The Unified Installer was the component which could orchestrate the installation of the whole System Center Suite. There are other efforts currently from Microsoft which are capable of installing the System Center suite though, mainly the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit coming from Microsoft, but also the Hydration Kit which is a community solution based on the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit developed by Mikeal Nystrom, an Microsoft MVP. Both solutions aren’t updated yet to support the R2 final release.