An important aspect of virtualization is the actual management: as an administrator, you want to have a single console for managing all your virtual machines and hosts. With software such as VMware’s VirtualCenter, you can manage a complete ESX environment and add a ton of extra features (such as DRS, HA, intelligent placement, templates, etc). Microsoft’s answer to the management question is System Center Virtual Machine Manager (also known as VMM).
This piece of software is your one-stop shop to all your Virtual Server 2005 R2 (and in the 2008 release) Hyper-V hosts and even your VI3 infrastructure. VMware’s Virtual Center can be added and so ESX hosts can be managed from within VMM. Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provides most Virtual Center Server functionality including VMotion. More complex tasks such as adding hosts to an ESX cluster must be done using Virtual Center itself.
It is also tightly integrated with other System Center products (such as integration with System Center Operations Manager 2007) and Power Shell. A very interesting feature is Performance and Resource Optimization (or PRO). PRO is a feature of VMM which can dynamically respond to failure scenarios or poorly configured components that are identified in hardware, operating systems or applications. VMM 2008 also integrates with the new clustering support in Windows Server 2008 to allow for fault-tolerant and cluster aware virtual machines to be created. It leverages the much talked about Quick Migration technique.
(Part 1) & (Part 2)
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