System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 Beta

System Center Virtual Machine Manager, a part of the System Center management suite of products, is Microsoft’s virtualisation management solution.  Using VMM, administrators can:

• Centrally manage many virtualisation hosts
• Simplify and automate many tasks using a library of reusable resources
• Convert physical machines and VMware virtual machines into Hyper-V virtual machines
• Delegate virtualisation administration
• Delegate rights to users so they can deploy virtual machines without the assistance of IT
• Integrate VMM with System Center Operations Manager to detect health or performance issues and automatically respond to them by moving virtual machines

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is the current release of the product.  Microsoft is developing and testing a successor, due for release in the coming months, that refocuses the role of VMM to providing services to the business.  You can start evaluating and testing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta 2 now for your environment or customers.

Key New Features

VMM 2012 is a very different management solution to its predecessors.  Rather than being just a virtualisation solution, one can consider it to be a service delivery solution.  This approach is Microsoft’s continues acknowledgement that IT department’s role within the business is to provide services to the business, instead of just providing a virtualisation platform.  VMM 2012 enables IT to do this thanks to the following 4 pillars:

Deployment

Past versions of VMM have usually played a back office role that simplified virtualisation management.  This meant that the VMM server did not always need to be a highly available machine.  In fact, the VMM service could not be clustered.

Microsoft envisages VMM 2012 playing a much bigger role in the delivery of applications and services to the business.  This will place it firmly in the view of end users and the VMM server will become a mission critical machine.  The VMM 2012 service can be clustered. 

Existing customers will be able to upgrade existing VMM 2008 R2 servers to VMM 2012 and they can create VMM 2012 clusters to ensure that the VMM service will be highly available.

Fabric Management

Fabric is a new term that describes the entire virtualisation infrastructure that will be used to host business services.  This includes virtualisation hosts (now including Hyper-V, VMware and Citrix XenServer), the network (VLANs, IP address pools, and load balancers), storage area networks (SMI-S capable SANs), patch deployment, and so on. 

VMM 2012 can integrate with and will manage those elements of the IT infrastructure that are involved in the provisioning of host, storage, and network capacity for IT service delivery.  This will enable a more complete and automated creation of virtual machines in response to the requirements of the business.

Cloud

Cloud computing is a method of providing IT-based services where the business deploys the resources that they need, as and when they need them.  They are able to expand the capacity of those services as the business grows.  And they can do all of this without interacting with, or waiting on the administrators of the back-end systems. 

VMM 2012 is the foundation of the Microsoft private cloud (on-premises) strategy.  VMM 2012 will coordinate and abstract all of the required resources (virtualisation hosts, network, and storage), enabling non-virtualisation administrators to deploy virtual machines without requiring input from the IT department.  The administrator’s role is to manage and monitor the back end systems using Microsoft System Center.

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Don't forget that you can sign up for the Microsoft Virtual Academy Challenge and take on Cloud Pro editor Max Cooter.

Useful links 

Microsoft Virtualisation for VMware professionals 

Differentiating VMware and Microsoft 

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1

Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta 

If you want to take things a bit further than the Microsoft Virtual Academy then Microsoft also offers IT Pro courses for more advanced certification.

Check out: 

70-659: TS: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization (Hyper-V+VMM) 

70-400: TS: Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007