What’s New in System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

The following list summarizes VMM enhancements and new functionality in the System Center 2012 SP1 release. Additional details are provided further below.

• System Requirements:
  Changes to supported versions of the operating system, and other required software. For a complete list of supported configurations, see System Requirements for System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager.
• Networks:
  • New model for virtual machine networking, including network virtualization and VLANs for network isolation.
  • Management of the Hyper-V extensible switch, including deployment and configuration of virtual switch extensions using a new logical switch concept.
  • Support for Network Virtualization with the support for using DHCP to assign customer addresses, and for using either the IP rewrite or Network Virtualization with Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) mechanism to virtualize the IP address of a virtual machine.
• Services:
  Improvements in services.
• VHDX Support:
  Support for VHDX with the functionality to convert a virtual hard disk format from .vhd to .vhdx. There are placement enhancements to determine the format of a virtual hard disk based on the operating system of the destination host (when you create a virtual machine with a blank virtual hard disk), and the provisioning of a physical computer as a Hyper-V host supports the use of a .vhdx file as the base operating system image. Additionally, you can use VMM to rapid provision virtual machines that use VHDX-based virtual hard disks from SAN-copy capable templates.
• Live Migration:
  Enhancements to live migration.
• Storage:
  The following enhancements:
  • Support for file shares that use the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 protocol. For more information, see SMB 3.0 File Shares.
  • Support for the new Windows Standards-Based Storage Management service, which uses the same WMI-based programming interface that is included in Windows Server 2012. This new API enables you to discover storage by using multiple provider types. In addition, support for the thin provisioning of logical units was added.
• Provision a Physical Computer as a Hyper-V Host:
  Support for using a virtual hard disk that is in the .vhdx format as the base operating system image, and for performing deep discovery to retrieve more detailed information about the physical computer.
• Operations Manager Integration:
  Ability to use Operations Manager to view information related to application hosts, load balancers, and user roles, in addition to information related to virtual machines, services, host systems, network adapters, and other elements of the fabric. For more information about, see Configuring Operations Manager Integration with VMM.
• VMM Console:
  • Support for creating user interface (UI) extensions for the VMM console. For more information, see Support for VMM Console Add-Ins.
  • Several significant performance enhancements have been made to the VMM console. Load times have been decreased and performance of sorting and filtering views has significantly improved. When viewing job history, jobs are now loaded incrementally and the views have a richer set of date filtering options, reducing the effect of large sets of jobs on console performance.
  • Ability to use the VMM console to configure availability options for virtual machines on Hyper-V host clusters, without having to open Failover Cluster Manager. For more information, see Configuring Availability Options for Virtual Machines in System Center 2012 SP1.
• Updatable Help for VMM Cmdlets:
  Support for updateable Help for VMM cmdlets. For more information about how to download updated help for VMM cmdlets, see about_VMM_2012_Updating_Help, or type the following command in a command shell:

  Get-Help about_VMM_2012_Updating_Help

Read more about the new features here.

Download the System Center 2012 SP1 beta here.