System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007

The Virtualization Management Console snap-in that is included with Windows Server virtualization is limited in several ways, and it’s mainly intended for managing virtual machines on a few servers at a time. Large enterprises want infrastructure solutions, however, and not just point tools. System Center Virtual Machine Manager fills this gap and will enable you to centralize management of a large enterprise’s entire virtual machine infrastructure, rapidly provision new virtual machines as needed, and efficiently manage physical server utilization. Plus it’s fully integrated with the Microsoft System Center family of products, so you can leverage your existing skill sets as you migrate your network infrastructure to Windows Server 2008.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager runs as a standalone server application, and it can be used to manage a virtualized datacenter that contains hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines in an Active Directory environment. System Center Virtual Machine Manager will be able to manage virtual machines running on both Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows 2008 Server with Windows Server virtualization installed. You can even deploy System Center Virtual Machine Manager in a fiber-channel SAN environment for performing tasks such as the following:

• Deploying VMs from your SAN library to a host

• Transferring VMs from a host to your library

• Migrating VMs from one host to another host

The administrator console for System Center Virtual Machine Manager is built upon Windows PowerShell, and you can use it to add and manage host machines, create and manage virtual machines, monitor tasks, and even migrate physical machines to virtual ones (something called P2V).

System Center Virtual Machine Manager also includes a self-service Web portal that enables users to independently create and manage their own virtual machines. The way this works is that the administrator predetermines who can create virtual machines, which hosts these machines can run on, and which actions users can perform on their virtual machines.

At the time of this writing, System Center Virtual Machine Manager is in Beta 1 and supports managing only virtual machines hosted on Virtual Server 2005 R2.