Supported Topologies

System Center Essentials will support the following site configurations:

-  For a computer to be managed by SCE it must be inthe same Active Directory forest as the SCE server.  We support any number of domains as long as they are trusted domains.

SCE Server

The server where you install System Center Essentials must be one of the following operating sytems:
- Windows Server 2003 R2
- Windows Server 2003 SP1

Managed Computers

In SCE we support the following client computers to be managed:
- Windows Server 2003 R2
- Windows Server 2003 SP1
- Windows Server 2000 SP4
- Windows XP SP2
- Windows 2000 SP4  

Database

SCE requires SQL 2005 as its database.  We support Express, Standard, Workgroup, and Enterprise versions of SQL 2005.  SCE does not support SQL running in a clustered environment.  

High Availability

To obtain the type of "high avaialbility" that you would receive in a mult-server/redundant Ops Mgr 2007 environment, you would need to upgrade to Ops Mgr 2007 and WSUS.  There is no agent failover mechanism in SCE 2007.