With Microsoft’s virtualization platform reaching
maturity in 2008, the company’s offerings now
span the PC desktop, small-to-midsized businesses
(SMBs), enterprises, and even the largest
data centers. What’s missing is centralized
management, especially in large environments.
Businesses need ways to manage environments in which virtual
and physical machines interact, automate the distribution of virtualized
resources, and consolidate legacy physical servers into virtual
environments. The new version of Microsoft’s virtual environment
management product addresses those needs. Here’s what you need
to know about Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager
2008 (VMM 2008).
What Is VMM 2008?
VMM is a data-center management server that provides functionality
specific to virtualized environments. Key functionality includes the
ability to convert legacy and underutilized hardware servers into virtual
machines (VMs); provision, deploy, and manage VMs and other
virtual assets; and automatically optimize a virtualized infrastructure.
VMM 2008 also provides virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion facilities
for moving VMs off of VMware ESX Server.
Heterogeneous Management
VMM 2008 can manage all of Microsoft’s virtual environment server
products, including Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Windows
Server 2008 Hyper-V, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. That’s to
be expected. But it can also manage VMware ESX Server, a surprising
boon for those who run heterogeneous environments.
In a recent briefing, Microsoft program manager David Armour
told me that VMM 2008 treats ESX Server as a “first-class citizen,”
providing access to the most frequently needed ESX Server management
functions. But it also lets you leverage unique VMM functionality,
such as automated VM placement, VMM’s Microsoft SQL Server
2005–based library, and the like.
As a member of the System Center family of management products,
VMM 2008 produces and can consume System Center alerts and
can trigger actions based on those alerts. This integration with key
System Center products such as Operations Manager 2007 means that
it’s possible to monitor physical and virtual machines from a single
interface, while leveraging virtualization-specific functionality. The
VMM 2008 UI is also similar to that of other System Center products
and is modeled after that of Ops Manager, helping admins get up and
running quickly.
And as with many other recent Microsoft administrative consoles,
the VMM console is built entirely on top of Windows PowerShell—so
everything you can do from the GUI is possible via scripting as well. It’s
also possible to perform actions in the GUI and find out what underlying
scripts are used to perform those actions, then use those scripts as
the basis for automated routines of your own.
Automated VM Deployment
VMM 2008 analyzes the virtualization hosts in your environment and
recommends the most appropriate physical servers for your virtualized
workloads. This feature, called Intelligent Placement, can also
work in an automated fashion if desired, moving virtual assets from
host to host as needed and on the fly. After VMs are deployed, you can
monitor their settings and manage their placement accordingly.
The VMM 2008 library provides a central location for managing
and storing virtual assets such as VMs, virtual hard disks (VHDs),
ISO files, profiles, customization scripts and sysprep answer files, and
templates. You can implement multiple libraries in large, distributed
environments to prevent WAN-based performance problems.
A new VMM 2008 feature, Performance and Resource Optimization
(PRO), optimizes virtualized resources using performance and
health data provided by Ops Manager 2007 management packs. VMM
2008 also integrates with the failover clustering feature in Windows
Server 2008, giving your virtualized environments cluster-aware, highavailability
functionality.
Installing and Using VMM 2008
Unlike Microsoft’s free VM management tool, Hyper-V Manager,
VMM 2008 must be installed in an Active Directory (AD) domain. (VM
hosts don’t need to be domain members, however.) It can be installed
on top of Server 2008 x64 only and includes a copy of SQL Server 2005
Express, which the VMM library and reporting functionality require.
It can also use existing SQL Server installations, including SQL Server
2008. You can install the VMM 2008 admin console on Windows Vista
SP1, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP SP3. A self-service portal,
which you can install on Server 2008 and Windows 2003R2, lets you
provide VMM functionality via an intranet. You need to install a VMM
2008 agent on each host and library server.
Compared to Hyper-V Manager, VMM 2008 offers an amazing
amount of additional functionality. The UI is more sophisticated and provides advanced filtering and host groups,
letting you view logical groups of VMs on any
number of physical hosts in a single view. A
resizable preview window lets you view running
VMs, limiting the need to connect to the
VM and open it in a separate window. This
filtering and grouping also makes managing
clusters of VM hosts much easier.
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