 Hello everyone, welcome to Windows Server Summit 2024. My name is Aakash and I hope you are excited to hear what we have to share around System Center today. Well, the cats out of the bag now. Today we are proud to announce that the next version of System Center, that is System Center 2025, will be released later this year. This is in continuation of the ongoing System Center investments that we have made a commitment to each of you. Before I jump into all the details, I will quickly run down the agenda for today. So today we have about 25 minutes to walk through these topics. We are going to reiterate what System Center means to each of us, share roadmap about all the version of System Center products, then we get into the crux of today's meeting by talking about System Center 2025 and what it entails. So let's jump into it. For those of you who don't know me, I am Aakash Basraj and I work as a product manager at System Center Product Group. I've been in System Center business for about four plus years now and I'm joined by my colleague Kartik who will talk about his favorite topic, data center management using virtual machine manager. Thanks for joining, Kartik. So let's get started. This is a quick overview of System Center products and their use cases. System Center has been the workhorse data center management tool for more than 30% of Windows Server customers over the past couple of decades. System Center's main target is for on-premises data center management and it will remain to do so for upcoming releases of Windows. What has really clicked is the close partnership that we maintain with Windows Server team ensuring support for all latest versions of Windows and its latest capabilities. Without draining further into each product, I want to address that System Center suite will be released with every new major version of Windows Server allowing you to install and manage them easily. Specifically, these six products are unmatched when grouped together and we appreciate you, our System Center users for your support and usage so far. While we continue to support and provide meaningful enhancements to these products, we want to help you transition to cloud management services such as SCOM Management Instance and others allowing you to read the benefit of Azure and its evergreen services. More on this in upcoming slides. I want to share a quick update on the existing LTSC releases that is System Center 2019 and 2022. We will be releasing UR6 for System Center 2019 to ensure your System Center 2019 environments are up to date with security fixes as the product is going out of mainstream support by end of April. UR6 will be released later this month. Additionally, System Center 2022 will continue to be supported for the next three years followed by extended support. So we will provide product updates and patches for System Center 2022 as mentioned in the slide. However, the big announcement for today is the System Center 2025 that will be released in GA version in the latter part of this year along with Windows Server 2025. We heard your strong feedback from last time where we delayed the release of System Center 2022 by six months from that of Windows Server 2022 and it impacted the users by preventing them from using Windows Server 2022. So this time around we will ensure to release both these products together with high quality. So what is new in System Center 2025? Talking about, talking from investment perspective, these are the three main focus areas. Our primary focus is for us to provide you with best-in-class data center management tool that can manage your heterogeneous infrastructure which are based on the evolution of data centers that are undergoing B to the cloud or updates to the hardware systems. As mentioned earlier, System Center 2025 will support installation and management of Windows Server 2025 servers and based on your feedback again, we are going to support management of Azure Stack HCI infrastructure, specifically Azure Stack HCI 23 H2. So keep your feedback coming in so that we can adapt accordingly. Moving to the next pillar, as you may have seen in Windows Server 2025 announcements that one of the big lever that we are pushing is that of security. As the data centers and applications evolve towards hybrid state, we want to ensure that the management tools are compliant, safe and secure. In System Center 2025, we plan to reduce the usage of NTLM and credit SSP as much as possible and use alternate authentications such as Kerberos and Open Authentication wherever possible. We plan to add support for TL S1.3 to ensure secure communication between System Center servers and management clients. Additionally, we will support Gen2 VMs. We will talk about Gen2 VMs and its benefit in upcoming slide. Lastly, as you evaluate and plan to reduce on-premises footprint, we want to support infrastructure modernization. You may have seen earlier in SCOM 2022, we added discovery of Azure Migrate, helping you evaluate cost benefits of moving to cloud while modernizing your management services. We will continue to invest in similar areas. For users who cannot migrate to cloud right away, we will help bringing cloud services to System Center via ARC, specifically ARC for SAVMM. And last but not the least, System Center, SAVMM specifically, will provide capabilities to convert your private cloud software from VMware to alternatives such as Hyper-V and Azure Stack at CI. This ensures business continuity with reliable support and modernization of data centers. That said, let's get into the finer details of what is new in specific products. We will start with VMM and my colleague Karthik will walk you through the updates. By delivering System Center 25 closely with Windows Server 20.25, we are bringing you management support for the latest Windows Server version right from day zero. Understanding our customers' preferences to manage their heterogeneous infrastructure with SCVMM, we are adding support for management of Azure Stack at CI 23H2 clusters from SCVMM 20.25. Customers will also have an enhanced experience while converting their VMware VMs to Windows Server or Azure Stack at CI through SCVMM. SCVMM 20.25 also brings significant security enhancements as all virtual machines created through SCVMM will default to Generation 2, which provides faster unsecured routing. With SCVMM 20.25, customers will also see a reduction in the number of scenarios which use credit SSP and NTLN as their authentication mechanisms. As customers' data centers evolve, so do our solutions. With the general availability of Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM from November 2023, customers can now use Azure management services like Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, etc. to secure, govern, monitor, and configure their SCVMM managed VMs through Azure Arc. Customers will also get Arc-enabled capabilities of Windows Server 20.25 like hard patching for Arc-enabled SCVMM VMs right from day zero. The end-of-life Windows Server 20.12 or two VMs can continue to be in supported state with extended security updates procured via Arc-enabled SCVMM. Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM also gives the ability to perform lifecycle operations such as start, stop, create, scale, resize, and delete your SCVMM managed VMs that are hosted in customers' data centers. All these activities are governed by Azure role-based access control enabling customers team to perform VM operations in a self-service fashion. This will serve as an effective replacement to end-of-life approaching Windows Azure back. With System Center 20.25, we are also discontinuing Azure Profile's future of SCVMM and System Center's service provider foundation, SPF, as these capabilities are now being built into Arc-enabled SCVMM. Thanks, Karthik, for the update on Virtual Machine Manager. Moving on to Data Protection Manager. With a steadfast commitment to improving workload coverage, Data Protection Manager 20.25 ensures comprehensive management support from day zero for Windows Azure 20.25, integrating seamlessly with the SharePoint subscription edition and introducing features like virtual DPM support for VMware. A DPM 20.25 brings the capability to exclude specific disks from backups in Hyper-V environments, offering flexibility and efficiency in data protection strategies. At the core of DPM 20.25 innovation is a heightened emphasis on security enhancements, recognizing the paramount importance of safeguarding sensitive information. DPM 20.25 introduces the capability to securely store the passphrase in Azure Keyword, significantly increasing data security by leveraging Azure's robust cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, it embraces the latest in encryption technology by supporting TLS 1.3, ensuring that all data transmissions are protected by the security standards available. The adoption of support for OLED between 19 further underscores DPM 20.25's commitment to security. That said, these are some of the finer details that we are looking to share currently as part of our 20.25 plans. Let me give you a little bit more information on what is coming next. So we are planning to release systems in our 20.25 by end of April in the preview version. So we plan to release virtual machine manager and data protection manager in the preview version based on the feedback that we have received and based on how the validation has happened. We will take those features or take those enhancements to 20.25 GA. Having said that, we will be releasing all the six products, which is Orchestrator, OSCOM, DPM, VMM, Service Manager, SMA, all of them we are planning to release in 20.25 GA and then we hope to continue supporting with enhancements to these products. That brings us to the end of our session today. I really thank you for the time you've shared and the feedback that you constantly give on systems and our products. For any feedback, I request each of you to drop a note to systemscentralfeedbackatmax.com and you can get in touch with me at LinkedIn as well under the same name.