Virtual Machine Manager Manages Clouds, Services

The next version of Microsoft’s software for managing virtualized infrastructures became publicly available in Apr. 2012. System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) can manage the infrastructure needed to support on-premises or hosted services or a combination of both, and can manage multi-hypervisor environments from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware. VMM 2012 can use server application virtualization to allow existing Windows applications to be directly deployed to Windows Azure. VMM 2012 now supports service modeling and configuration to manage an application or service life-cycle—not just data center infrastructure or virtual machines (VMs)—either on-premises or hosted on Azure or both.

Managing Virtualized Data Centers

VMM is a centralized management tool for managing physical and virtual IT infrastructure by facilitating the creation of VMs and supporting dynamic management of the resources that they require. The previous version, VMM 2008 R2 SP1, was released in Mar. 2011 with support for key Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 features, such as dynamic memory allocation to VMs and the RemoteFX graphics enhancements for VMs running the Windows desktop OS.