This topic is about the evolution of Virtual Machine Manager.
First we used the Microsoft Hyper-V release 1 manager in our datacenter with each virtualmachine it’s own LUN’s (fiberdisk)
In this picture below is a service roll in Windows 2008 Enterprise Server.
The first Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2008 wich was separated from the Operating System looks like this :
New Hyper-V architecture was released with Windows 2008 R2 Server which supports shared volume between nodes. It called as Clustered shared volume (CSV). This volume can be used by all nodes at the same time. All virtual machines located in this LUN can be started on any of the host. If one node dies virtual machine will get started in any other available nodes. And can be live migrated (like vMotion) to other available nodes. It also saved a lot of diskspace.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Service Pack1 made the difference with Dynamic Memory and Remote FX.
When you look to the history of Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager the topology looks like this today :
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 can manage a mixed virtual environment like:
VMWare ESX Servers and Cluster Support.
Citrix Xen Servers and Cluster support.
Microsoft is making a big jump this year with great features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 with Cloud technology.
Microsoft Virtualization developer team has worked really hard and have listened to IT professionals and Customers.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager must be High Available to manage the virtual environment on-premises and Cloud with Windows Azure, and with this we have a hybrid virtual managed environment.
This Virtual environment has been divided in areas in virtual Machine Manager 2012 :
1. Infrastructure enhancements
Highly Available VMM server. As SCVMM is core of management infrastructure for virtual environment it is really important for this infrastructure to be highly available in todays big datacenters.
2. Fabric Management
SCVMM 2012 can now manage even more hypervisors: Hyper-V, VMWare and XEN. Also it can integrate with remote management such as iLO and SMASH. One interesting thing here is also ability for bare metal provisioning meaning that with SCVMM 2012 you can provision Hyper-V even on bare metal computers withoudt much manual work. Cluster creation with storage provisioning is also one of the interesting new features. Regarding the network management enhancements, SCVMM 2012 can now integrate with load balancers. Besides that now you can also assign IP and MAC from pools. Dynamic Optimization and new Power Management features are also important updates.
And now for the two most expected features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012:
3. Cloud Managementor Simple Cloud Creation.
SCVMM can now abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds, delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas. Also now it is rather easy to enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud.
4. Service Management
With SCVMM you can now define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and application packages. For example you can create service template for three tier application which consist of frontend, middletier and backend. During service deployment operating images and applications can be composed. And of course if you need your virtual machines in a service to scale out, no problem, SCVMM 2012 makes this possible. And final and maybe most important feature in service management is ability to leverage great and powerfull technologies like Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V). Server App-V behaves in same manner as client App-V, so they are dynamic, “decoupled from OS” and easy to manage.
There are of course much, much more enhancements in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Check them out on technet and start your yourney to the cloud.
And at last Microsoft project System Center Codename “Concero” preview is more then great easy to manage Virtual Machine Manager in the Cloud.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager evolution is better then ever before, and almost every choice of the customer is possible with Microsoft virtualization technology on-premises and/or in the Cloud with Windows Azure.
Thanks to James van den Berg