SCOM 1801 has been relased

Yesterday the news finally came, System Center 1801 has been relased. An with that, of course SCOM 1801.

This is the first release in the new Semi-Annual Channel which will release twice a year while the Long-Term Servicing Channel will be released at a much lower cadence. But what´s the difference between these two tracks? The Semi-Annual Channel

• You will receive the latest updates and features with releases twice a year
• Each build (1801,1807 etc.) is supported for 18 months, then you must move to a newer build
• New features added (all the new features will be put into this channel)

The Long-Term Servicing Channel

• You will receive new versions at a much slower pace (think SCOM 2012 and SCOM 2016 as an example)
• 5 years of mainstream support and 5 years of extended support
• Update Rollups only, mostly fixes and probably around zero new features added

So what´s new in SCOM 1801 then? The list of news;

• Enhancements in performance that for example allow for the console to continue to respond while a management pack is imported, deleted or changed. ”Updates and Recommendations” that were launched with SCOM 2016 now includes third-party products based on customer feedback.
• Log file monitoring for Linux/UNIX servers. With the support for FluentD you can now monitor Linux/Unix logs just as well as you can monitor Windows server logs. Some of the news is that you can now use wildcards in the log names and directories.
• Added support for Kerberos authentication between management servers and Linux/Unix servers. This adds to the security since you no longer need to activate ”basic authentication” for Windows Remote Management (WinRM).
• Integration between Operations Manager and Service Map, which is a part of Operations Management Suite (OMS). This integration gives you the ability to automatically map your applications and have distributed applications automatically generated (and maintained) in SCOM.
• Support for installing SCOM on Windows Server 1709. Note that 1709 is Core-only. There is no GUI available in this version, instead you should be looking at “Project Honolulu” for remote management.
• A completely new way of upgrading SCOM to newer versions (YY/MM) directly from within the Operations Console.
• And last, but not in any way the least. A completely re-rebuilt all HTML5 web console with no dependencies to Silverlight! (Finally!) You can now create your own dashboards inside the web console stored in a management pack of your choice, which makes it easy to export and backup those dashboards to be re-used. This new console will work in several different web browsers since there are no Silverlight dependencies. See an example below.

How can I upgrade to SCOM 1801? 1801 supports an in-place upgrade from the following versions:

• System Center 2012 R2 UR12 to the latest update rollup
• System Center 2016 RTM to the latest update rollup

Update: It seems there was a typo in the documentation when I originally wrote this post saying that 2012 R2 RTM could be upgraded to 1801. That´s wrong, you MUST be at least on UR12 to be able to upgrade to 1801.

Summary I will check more into this new release in the near feature as I already have a number of posts planned about it. In the meantime, if you have any questions, just add a comment below and I´ll get back as soon as possible.