Infrastructure provisioning is about enabling enterprises and service providers to provision physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures that meet key requirements such as workload scale and performance, multi- tenancy, and chargeback. System Center 2012 R2 can provision custom or standardized infrastructures for on-premises, service provider, or Windows Azure environments.

System Center 2012 R2 delivers best-in-class monitoring for Windows Server environments. The considerable size of the Operations Manager installed base has helped created a wealth of information on Windows Server-based environments; this in turn helps inform the capabilities built into the Management Packs that Operations Manager supports. System Center also provides rich monitoring across platforms, such as RHEL/SUSE Linux, Oracle Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX. With the Configuration Manager component, System Center provides cross- platform configuration support for Linux and Unix systems.

With public cloud computing taking off, enterprise application owners expect simplicity and agility when dealing with IT staffs. They might even work around the IT department if their requirements are not met at the speed that they’re looking for. Such a scenario presents a less-than- ideal outcome for IT professionals trying to establish a trusted advisor relationship with their application and business counterparts. To mitigate such outcomes, IT staffs need centralized visibility and control into all datacenter infrastructure used to host applications. System Center 2012 R2 gives application owners the agility they need while providing IT staffs with the tools to drive needed automation and control.