Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Supports Hyper-V

The May 2008 beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, combined with a second Hyper-V release candidate, shows that Microsoft is likely to release both products before the end of 2008. VMM aims to manage both an organization’s library of virtual machines (VMs) and the physical servers hosting the VMs because management will ultimately be as important to successful server consolidation as actual virtualization features are. Although VMM can manage Microsoft and VMware virtualization products and has good features for day-to-day management of VMs, a key feature requires tight interaction with System Center Operations Manager.

Managing Large-Scale Virtualized Datacenters

VMM is a software tool for provisioning, managing, and storing VMs for hardware virtualization. Hardware virtualization enables multiple OS instances to run simultaneously on a single physical host computer. Each such “guest” OS instance runs in a VM that emulates a complete computer in software, including the processor, memory, graphics card, network interface, and storage devices (such as disk and CD-ROM drives). This emulation gives the guest what appears to be exclusive control of the hardware, but in reality the hardware is shared with other OS instances. Although hardware virtualization was initially used to test applications and application configurations, organizations are now using virtualization to consolidate production applications onto fewer, better utilized servers.