While I’ve talked a bit before about the differences between OpsMgr 2007 and System Center Essentials, in my earlier post on Microsoft System Center, the following two tables offer a direct comparison of the feature set between Essentials and OpsMgr and Essentials and Configuration Manager. This should give you a clear picture of the capabilities of Essentials. Remember, Essentials is limited to monitoring only 30 servers.
Features Available in Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Essentials 2007:
Features | OpsMgr | Essentials | Comments |
| Management packs | X | X | |
| Monitor servers, clients, and services | X | X | |
| Management pack authoring | X | X | Essentials has a basic interface; the OpsMgr interface is more sophisticated. |
| Role-based security | X | Essentials does not include a facility for role-based administration. | |
| Multiple management servers in domain | X | X | All monitored systems must be in the same Active Directory forest. |
| Reporting | X | X (basic) | Essentials does not include a data warehouse or fixed grooming schedule (only a maximum of 37 days of report data can be stored); the Operations and Reporting databases are on the same server, and Report authoring is not supported. |
| Fault tolerance support | X | Essentials does not support database clustering of the Operations or Reporting database or clustering the Essentials management server. | |
| Connector framework | X | ||
| ACS | X | ||
| AD Integration | X | X | AD integration with Essentials consists of pushing Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and creating AD security groups. |
| PowerShell Integration | X | ||
| Web console | X |
Features Available in Configuration Manager 2007 and System Center Essentials 2007:
Features | ConfigMgr | Essentials | Comments |
| Update management | X | X | |
| Software distribution | X | X | |
| Hardware and software inventory | X | X | Essentials captures approximately 30 hardware and software attributes. |
| Operating System deployment | X | ||
| Mobile device management | X | ||
| Desired configuration management | X | ||
| Branch office support | X | X (basic) | Essentials does not include site servers. |
| Network Access Protection (NAP) support | X | ||
| Wake on Local Area Network (LAN) | X |
