What’s New: System Center 2016
System Center 2016 is currently in technical preview 3. To download it and try it out, go here: https://microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-technical-preview. These preview versions only allow a certain number of clients to connect, and will only be good for 60 days. You also cannot upgrade to these versions, or upgrade from them when a new one comes out. These should only be used in test labs to evaluate new features.
This post will go through some of the significant changes for each product in suite.
Configuration Manager
Configuration Manager 2016 is all about Windows 10 support. It will be able to apply extensive MDM policies to Windows 10, as well as expanded MDM for Mac and Linux clients. It will also have the ability to control feature updates for Windows 10 for those running on the current build SKU.
CM 2016 will also support doing in-place upgrades to Windows 10. It will also be able to sideload apps and do bulk enrollment of Windows 10 devices.
Some infrastructure changes are the fact that you will be able to do preferred management points based on boundary groups, meaning that you no longer have to do a secondary site to assign management points to devices. Next, support was added for Azure virtual machines, so you can now control software deployments and updates for those machines from SCCM.
Virtual Machine Manager
The big improvement to VMM is ability to add Azure subscriptions. While the capabilities are still limited, administrators will be able to start, stop, and restart Azure instances. Administrators can also launch RDP sessions to their instances from the VMM console. Hopefully Microsoft will be adding additional capabilities before RTM.
VMM 2016 will also add capabilities for guarded hosts and shielded VM’s. It’s not entirely clear how this function from the documentation, but it’s supposed to “help provide protection against malicious host administrators and malware.” I read that as additional protections around console access to your VM’s.
Service Manager
The big improvements to SCSM is that ability to two analysts to be working on the same item at the same time. Also, Microsoft added the ability to schedule AD syncs.
Operations Manager
This big improvement in SCOM for 2016 is the ability to schedule maintenance modes. You can now create maintenance schedules and apply them to hosts so that alerts are not generated during schedule maintenance. This schedules can also be applied dynamically, meaning that different classes can be put into maintenance, and not just individual machines.
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