Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been Released To Manufacturing (RTM’d)!
An evaluation version can be downloaded here.
Zane Adam, Senior Director of Virtualizatio Strategy over at MS Redmond said:
“They are seeing the many cost reduction and management simplification benefits of Hyper-V and the SCVMM 2008 integration with the rest of System Center. Now that RTM is official, I fully expect the rate of Hyper-V deployments to further accelerate. Through the SCVMM 2008 console, administrators can see the entirety of their data center infrastructure – physical or virtual. SCVMM 2008 facilitates key functions like P2V (physical to virtual) migration, Intelligent Placement (selecting the best virtual host for a VM), and managing Hyper-V host clusters, to name just a few. SCVMM 2008 works closely with its siblings – particularly SC Ops Mgr – in identifying consolidation candidates and in Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), a new feature in which SCVMM 2008 can alert and recommend solutions to administrators about failing virtual machines or hardware. As I mentioned above, this comprehensive view extends throughout the data center as SCVMM 2008 is capable of seeing and managing VMware ESX infrastructure through Virtual Center.”
The full transcript is here.
This is really great. SCVMM is always an integral part of conversation I have with customers artound Hyper-V and once the new version is available (1st of November 2008) I agree that many projects will start moving and being implemented.
Watch a silverlight demo and see the features yourself.
I saw this via Clive Watson’s blog.
What will SCVMM 2008 do over SCVMM 2008?
Virtual Machine Manager can manage multiple VMWare ESX VirtualCenter licences from one place, something that even VMWare can’t do !VMWare are working on it but it will be just a web console and not as fully featured as Microsoft’s VMM.
Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) is another key feature that puts VMM over ESX. Matt McSpirit explains it well:
“Take an example of a virtualised Exchange Server. If a service crashes inside that VM, and that service is an Exchange related service, and that service crash results in a CPU spike. The VM is still running, but now, it’s consuming more resource, so DRS chooses to move it. It does the same on it’s new host, so DRS moves it again. SC Operations Manager would identify the crash as being an Exchange issue, and fix the crash, rather than move the VM, even if that VM is running on a VMware infrastructure”
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 