March 16, 2010, 11:09 AM — With virtualization taking over the computing world, enterprises everywhere are finding that virtual machines spread across an organization need to be managed as much as their physical computers are. Companies are also figuring out that these virtual machines have special needs and requirements that can multiply very quickly as servers are added, moved, changed or removed.
Clearly an administrator needs a software package capable of managing a sprawling environment full of virtual machines; Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2, delivered in August 2009, is the software giant's latest response.
SCVMM is specially designed to work with Hyper-V, Microsoft's flagship hypervisor, which was newly updated for the fresh Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system release. But it also boasts the ability to manage both VMware and Hyper-V environments, a feature not found in VMware's management tools. (Contrary to some printed reports, SCVMM does not support Xen.)
Let's take a look at what SCVMM 2008 R2 can do.
Live migration and other 'hot' features
One of the biggest improvements in Hyper-V 2.0 is the ability to move virtual machines from one physical machine to another, while the VMs are running, with no loss of service. VMware's tools and products have had this ability, called VMotion, for some time, but live migration is new to the Hyper-V platform.
The biggest feature of SCVMM 2008 R2 continues to be its ability to assist with these live migrations, with essentially one- or two-click access to move a virtual machine from one host to another with no perceptible loss of connectivity, performance or other interruption. Although live migration works with bare Hyper-V using the free tool, SCVMM makes it easier -- with better intelligence about the target virtual host to which you're migrating, available resources and other information.
SCVMM also interfaces with the fail-over clustering features of Windows Server 2008 R2 to make clustered virtual machines fault-tolerant, even across data centers and different geographic locations (bandwidth obviously being a potential limitation).
Further, SCVMM 2008 R2 also now allows the addition and removal of storage to virtual machines without interruption. This is useful when scaling capacity for certain disk-intensive workloads, and SCVMM makes it a relatively simple task to manage virtual hard disks and iSCSI pass-through disks on a "hot" basis without requiring reboots or other service interruptions.
Storage management has long been a frustration in Windows Land, and it's still not the easiest thing in the world, but SCVMM improves upon the process somewhat in this release.
Virtual machine management
Of course, you buy a management tool to help you manage, and the interface and capabilities of SCVMM are well suited for that. The product consolidates many management tasks -- such as VM creation and teardown, as well as physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical machine conversions -- into a single environment that plays well with the rest of your infrastructure, including other management tools. All of the system center products have the same UI elements, and in particular Operations Manager can look into VMM stuff and monitor health.
SCVMM also helps you optimize your data center in a rather clever fashion, through a feature called intelligent placement. When a VM is created and ready to use, SCVMM will recommend a suitable host on which to deploy that virtual machine. The software does this by analyzing performance data and resource requirements for both the workload that you identify and for a selection of host machines across your enterprise.
You can create and adjust placement algorithms for SCVMM to use, if you wish. This intelligent placement recommendation is fully configurable to take into account not only host machine resources and the projected usage of the VM, but also business rules you select.
