José Rodas has made a nice overview of all the new features of the What’s New in System Center 2012 R2!
Here is the overview:
Configuration Manager R2
- Deploy and manage Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
- Configure and deploy WiFi profiles, VPN configurations and certificates
- Maintenance windows exclusively for updates
- UI improvements for filtering and automation update deployment rule management
- Optimizes content distribution, providing clearer summary messages, and offering new distribution point usage data
- Reports to help with infrastructure planning and troubleshooting
- Make virtual hard drive (VHD) management easier by enabling the creation, modification and offline servicing of VHDs
- More information here
Operations Manager R2
- The Fabric Health Dashboard shows a detailed overview of the health of your private clouds and the fabric that services those clouds
- Microsoft Monitoring Agent is a new version of Operations Manager Agent that includes full functionality of Visual Studio IntelliTrace Collector for gathering full application profiling traces
- Synchronize OM alerts and Team Foundation Server (TFS) work items
- Support for taking IPv6 addresses as input for Network Discovery and display IPv6 addresses in the network-related views
- Support for monitoring Java applications
- More information here
Virtual Machine Manager
- Site-to-site network connections using private IP address
- Simplified guest IP management
- Site-to-site NVGRE gateway
- Enhancements to connectivity options of virtual machines networks to enable most tenant scenarios
- Live Cloning of virtual machines: Support for a new Hyper-V feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
- Enhanced support for Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Memory Features.
- Ability to create Windows and Linux-based virtual machines and multi-VM Services, from a gallery of templates.
- More information here
Orchestrator
- Support for Windows Server 2012 R2
- Install Service Management Automation web service and up to three (3) Runbook workers
- Use as part of the Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server configuration
- Enable use of Runbooks and perform other automation tasks using Windows PowerShell cmdlets
- Integration Pack for Microsoft SharePoint
- More information here
Data Protection Manager R2
- Back up DPM data in System Center 2012 R2 to Windows Azure Backup
- SQL Server Cluster Support – DPM now supports the use of clustered SQL Server node
- Virtualized deployment – DPM can be deployed in a virtual environment.
- Linux virtual machine backup provides support for the protection and backup of Linux virtual machines, in addition to the support already provided for Hyper-V virtual machines
- More Information here
Other Resources
- Server and Cloud Platform here
- Configuration Manager here
- Windows Azure Pack (WAP) here
- Cloud OS here
- News here
- Note: Service Manager R2 is compatible with Windows Server R2, and will have feature parity with the latest hotfix rollup of Service Manager SP1
The original post can be found here!