Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

The next version of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsoft’s System Center tool for provisioning, monitoring, and storing virtual machines (VMs) was released for public beta in Mar. 2009. It supports features such as live migration of VMs and hot changes to virtual hard disks that will be available in Windows Server 2008 R2. Live migration, in particular, helps Microsoft compete more effectively with VMware, which has had a similar feature since 2007.

Managing Live Migration, Hot Swap

System Center VMM can manage VMs that run on several different hardware virtualization technologies, including the following:

• Hypervisors, such as Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or VMware ESX, which are thin software layers that run directly on the server’s hardware (VMM requires VMware vCenter Server in order to manage VMware ESX)
• VM monitors, such as Microsoft Virtual Server, which is an application that runs on a host OS.

The current version, VMM 2008, was released in Nov. 2008.

The new beta is for VMM 2008 R2 and supports several new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.