Hi All,
in this post I want to write about SCVMM or how the “natives” call it “System Center Virtual Machine Manager” link to product in MS sites here.
a lot can be told about VMM (short for SCVMM 2008) , we can sit here and read about how it is a competitor to VMware Virtual Center and how VMM is better for you then Virtual Center.. I think the link I gave to VMM MS site will defiantly cover it.. so I don't really want to write to you about it, I do want to concentrate on several properties that VMM has regardless to VMware Virtual Center, I just want to let you know that Microsoft has something for you that can manage your VM’s and because you can download an actual evaluation of the product I wont show a lot of screen shots, this post is about getting the “1st taste” of what can be a great leverage to your virtualization environment.
first a few words on System Center, SC is a collection of products that we used to know in a different names in earlier version like SMS and MOM and a few more that always fit together, not to be confused , SC is NOT just a unified platform for all those products, its a whole concept by Microsoft to enable you manage your whole computing systems under 1 product, SC provides a lot of new features and abilities by itself and the work between dev teams about 1 bigger products has a lot of advantages to us as IT professionals.
SCVMM is no different, the Virtual machine manager as you can see from he’s name, is not ONLY a Hyper-V servers manager, like VMware VC, it aspire to manage your whole virtualization environment as we know it (lets not include in this post products like App-V former SoftGrid or Med-v former Kidaro) and that means everything… from client guest OS’s to Server guest OSs , from Hyper-V servers to ESX VMware… it can even mange VMware Virtual Center servers… all good stuff in one place
now, as somewhat of an expert in virtualization field by now , a lot of email I get is who wins in the battle of virtualization is it VMware or Microsoft.. the answer is always trickier then question, since MS have a bigger range of products, VMware does what it knows and focus on very good.. the advantage between ESX and Hyper-V in Win2k8 is not in favor for VMware but not because of ESX or VC, the only meaningful advantage the VMware has on Microsoft is located in VMFS 3, Virtual Machine File System, its ability to be mounted to multiple servers plays the major advantage in building a large server farms that runs a lot more VMs and their migration from server to server , even though it is possible in Hyper-V using clustering its still not the same and less then convenient to setup and manage.
VMM might be the counter strike Microsoft has, since this product can manage all of the server environments and VC included that brings Microsoft to the front of the Virtual machines management stage. it has ( now in BETA ) most of VC capabilities, Templates creation and a great functional library, it has good and detailed job center and also a self-service portal,even thought VMM still needs to be fine tuned in some places its going to be a great products to manage your Windows 2008 Hyper-V server that you going to setup anyways.. your ESX servers that you may or may not have or plan to buy..
either way VMM is something that you might want to take a look into, its fairly easy to use and intuitive, as always the more complicated task you want to do with it , it will get harder to do and less intuitive.
here is a glance for my personal VMM beta, with 4 Hyper-V servers and 8 VM’s .. like everything its begging, small environment -
if this post will get some good replays to me I’ll explain more on how to do stuff with VMM.
Thanks
Ido.