Virtual Machine Manager to Manage Clouds, Services

A beta of the next version of Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) became publicly available in Mar. 2011. VMM 2012 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—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 current version is VMM 2008 R2 SP1 and 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.