14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has reached a key milestone in the development process of the next iteration of System Center. The first Release Candidate for Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 was offered to testers in mid-January 2010, and is currently available for download. System Center Essentials is a unified management solution designed with midsize business customers in mind, providing proactive management capabilities to their IT environments. By leveraging System Center Essentials, customers are able to administer virtualized resources, but also monitor computers and integrate new software and updates.
Richard Rundle, a program manager on the System Center Essentials team, revealed that the evolution of System Center Essentials 2010 from Beta to RC was catalyzed by feedback from early adopters. The Redmond company took input from testers into account when it built “the following new functionality is included in the RC: support for Hyper-V Clusters and Live Migration; Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) Tips; Virtualization Jobs Status and Improved Updates and Software Overview Pages.”
Traditionally, the Release Candidate milestone signals the fact that a Microsoft product has entered the final stage of development before being released to manufacturing. There’s no word from the company on a specific launch deadline for System Center Essentials 2010, but the software giant asked testers to help drive home the release. “We have two goals for the release candidate that we need your help with: validating the new virtualization features and identifying quality issues that need to be fixed before shipping” Rundle stated.
System Center Essentials 2010 RC download package brings to the table 4 self-extracting files. Users will have to unpack all packages to the same folder . “If you currently have the Beta of Essentials 2010 installed you will need to uninstall the Beta before installing the RC. If you currently use Essentials 2007 you will not be able to upgrade to Essentials 2010 RC,” Rundle added.
System Center Essentials 2010 is available for download here.