Microsoft designed SCVMM and its
administrative console to manage hosts and VMs in the same domain, the same
forest, or a different forest joined through a
forest trust. It’s possible but extremely difficult
to use a non–domain-joined console
to manage domain-joined resources. John
Howard also has blog posts on this topic,
but you don’t want to attempt the procedure
unless absolutely necessary. If you
have VMs to manage in multiple forests,
I strongly recommend that you establish
forest trusts (rather than external trusts)
between the forests.
Modern Virtual Infrastructures
VMs are much easier to provision than
real machines, but once they’re in production,
they have many of the same
lifecycle issues that physical servers have.
For instance, you must patch them and
back them up. (For information about
patching VMs, see the sidebar “Microsoft’s
Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.”)
SCVMM isn’t a silver bullet for practicing
lifecycle management on your production
systems. It doesn’t address whether a system
should still be up and running, shut
down and stored in the SCVMM library,
or simply deleted. Your operational practices
must cover the server lifecycle issues,
regardless of whether the servers are virtual
or physical.
SCVMM is currently in public beta; you
can register for it at connect.microsoft.com.
It is scheduled to be released by the end of
2008.
For all the talk about virtualization, the
adoption of it is still low. One of the biggest
barriers to a wider acceptance of virtualization
is the cost of building a productioncapable
virtual infrastructure. IT budgets are
so tight that bottom-line costs for a solution
are extremely important. With Server 2008,
Hyper-V, and SCVMM 2008 and its integration
with SCOM, Microsoft has built a compelling
case for constructing a modern virtual
infrastructure at a reasonable price.
Register
