Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

A Brief History of System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager is one of the components of Microsoft System Center. As the name suggests, SCVMM is focused on helping you manage your virtual environment. It has always been a useful tool, but with the latest 2012 release it moves from handy to essential. But before getting into SCVMM 2012’s newest enhancements, I want to take a step back and go over the highlights of previous versions. SCVMM has always done a great job of enabling organizations to embrace Microsoft server virtualization through capabilities such as the following:

• Creating templates for virtual machines to enable fast deployment of new environments
• Managing large clusters of Hyper-V hosts
• Converting physical operating system instances to virtual machines
• Optimizing resources through automatic movement of virtual machines between hosts for best performance based on resource usage data enabled by connectivity to System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• Enabling end users to self-provision virtual machines based on quotas using a web-based portal

SCVMM 2008 R2 introduced the capability to manage VMware ESX–based virtual machines, which is a competitive hypervisor to Hyper-V. However, the ESX management feature was not widely used because of its limited management capabilities. This management, although limited, was a first step towards System Center managing non-Microsoft infrastructure elements, and is a theme continued and improved ...