System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Released to Market!

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provides a management solution for your virtualized data center that helps enable centralized management of your hosted infrastructure, increased server utilization for your customers, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms.If you are planning or have already begun your broad virtualized offering of Hyper-V (either Hyper-V server or Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V), SCVMM is a MUST have to rapidly provision, manage and operate your virtualization offering. Some Highlights of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 include:

Support for VMs Running on Windows Server 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 fully utilizes the foundational features and services of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server. This includes Hyper-V’s 64-bit architecture, attack hardened security model, fail-over cluster support, and others. VMM 2008 supports all Hyper-V functionality while providing VMM-specific functions, such as the Intelligent Placement, the Self-Service Portal, and the integrated Library.

Multi-Vendor Virtualization Platform Support

With its support for virtual machines running on Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware ESX infrastructure, VMM 2008 integrates multi-hypervisor management into one tool. VMM 2008 provides comprehensive support for VMware VI3 through integration with VMware’s Virtual Center.

Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO)

PRO is a new feature of VMM that can dynamically respond to failure scenarios or poorly configured components that are identified in hardware, operating systems, or applications. PRO’s capabilities are also available to VMware ESX or Virtual Server hosts, thus allowing administrators to manage their entire virtualized environment regardless of the virtualization platform they are using. If you are utilizing Operations Manager 2007 today in your managed hosted offering, PRO managment packs are specifically designed to deliver this new management function.

Host Cluster Support for “High Availability” Virtual Machines

With greatly expanded support for failover clusters, VMM 2008 improves its “high availability” capabilities for managing mission-critical virtual machines. VMM 2008 is now fully cluster-aware, meaning it can detect and manage Hyper-V host clusters as a single unit. New user-friendly features, such as automatic detection of added or removed virtual hosts and designating high-availability virtual machine with one click, facilitate the administrator’s work.

 The current evaluation version of VMM2008 is available today to download.

 Chris Samson - Senior Hosting Technology Specialist - Microsoft