Virtual Machine Manager

This session was all about the System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) product. Microsoft realise that the virtual world is driving a massive amount of growth for example, last year, 1 in 3 Enterprises bought Softgrid, they predict next year that will have increased to 1 in 2 of all Enterprises.

They consider that virtualisation should be a skill you learn as part of a techie skill set, not a specialism you struggle to achieve. SCVMM is here to help!

SCVMM is basically a pretty gui front end driving Powershell scripts, at the end of each wizard you can generally click a 'View Script' button should you want to see how things work or use it to make automated scheduled jobs for example.

P2V functionality is built in (costs extra with VMWare) as is V2V (convert VMWare machines to MS), although SSCVMM 08 will have the ability to natively manage both MS machines and VMWare machines. The first product on the market to take this holistic approach. The 2008 version will also have the ability patch offline machines.

There will be a delegation web portal too, this allows a user to login and manage their machine via a browser. This saves giving too many rights or having to deploy an application to that end user just to make life easier. (We deliver the VMWare machine application via Citrix). This is all controlled by Active Directory Group policies.

It is worth considering Server Management Suite Enterprise as this contains SCVMM, SCDPM, SCOM, SCCM - basically all the System Centre products.

W2K8 Enterprise edition allows you to run 4 virtual machines with no need to buy additional OS lics, Standard only 1, but Datacentre is unlimited.

Due to this Microsoft claim Hyper-V is 1/3 the cost of an equivalent VMWare environment.

One note of caution was raised with a nice quote from Gartner - Virtualising without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualisation in the first place!