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Microsoft System Center Offers Private Cloud Advisor: Page 2 of 2

Anderson affirms the more direct expression of competition. System Center Advisor will give Microsoft a way to differentiate itself from "our primary competitor, VMware." VMware recently added a vCenter Operations console to its management software for managing ESX Server virtual machines in the enterprise or in a VMware-based cloud.

Microsoft's Concero will be able to deploy Hyper-V virtual machines to Windows Servers internally or to the Windows Azure cloud. It was made available as beta software at the summit. It will become part of Virtual Machine Manager, one of the major components of System Center, by the end of the year. It is part of the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 beta code made available at the summit.

The ability to generate virtualized workloads that can be moved around "will result in deployments which are partly on private on-premise clouds based on Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V and partly on Windows Azure. In this hybrid world, it is imperative to have a management tool that manages across these environments," said Anderson in a blog.

System Center Advisor will be licensed outside the System Center suite. If you are already under contract for Microsoft Software Assurance on Windows Server, you will get Advisor as well, Anderson says. Amy Barzdukas, manager of server and tools communications, in a separate interview said the two announcements illustrate that System Center's Virtual Machine Manager "is the private cloud builder for enterprise IT."

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