Microsoft lifts the price of System Center by ten percent

Microsoft has revealed that the 2025 edition of its System Center management tool will debut on November 1st, at prices ten percent higher that it charged for its predecessor.

“The new pricing supports the continued development and improvement of System Center, ensuring it remains a leading solution for managing complex IT environments,” states a Microsoft post.

At least System Center has been spared a shift to subscriptions.

“The System Center 2025 licensing model for Standard and Datacenter will be the same as 2022 with server and client management licenses,” Microsoft’s post states. “Licenses are required only for the endpoints being managed. No additional licenses are needed for customers with SQL Server Standard Edition.”

Server management licensing for System Center 2025 will be based on physical cores that uses the same model applied to Windows Server 2025 model – which requires licenses for eight cores.

Inflation has been high around the world since System Center 2022 debuted. A ten percent hike therefore isn’t entirely out of order.

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Microsoft has also added features to the new version, among them improved security, more tools to manage Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure, and support for Azure Arc. Data Protection Manager, one of System Center’s components will gain the ability to securely store passphrase in Azure Key Vault.

System Center 2025 is not tied to Windows Server 2025, and the latter product remains in preview. But if Microsoft were to release the Server on the same day as System Center it would be a nicely neat debut for its 2025-generation datacenter software.

It looks like Microsoft won’t manage to tie things up in a neat bow: last week the company debuted a version of Server 2025 that previews its security baseline, without hinting at a release date. ®