Yesterday, David Mills, Senior Product Manager on System Center announced that the System Center Essentials 2010 Release Candidate is available. This is from the Nexus SC blog:

Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 provides a unified IT management solution that enables you to simply and efficiently perform complex management tasks across virtual and physical servers, PCs, hardware, software and IT services from a single console.

Essentials 2010 -

• Delivers single console monitoring and management with summary information, common tasks, alerts and reports, allowing you to quickly see and manage your IT environment.
• Provides rapid provisioning, importation, management and live migration of virtual servers.
• Simplifies complex management tasks like packaging and deploying software, and configuring Microsoft and third-party updates.
• Helps quickly solve problems using integrated alerting, expert knowledge and troubleshooting for servers, PCs and IT services running in your IT environment.

Here is the SCE 2010 Release Candidate download link.