System Center Virtual Machine Manager (Carmine)

Microsoft has just released Beta 1 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. This product is Microsoft's answer to Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management. I will not discuss all of the features as the System Center Development Team will be discussing that is detail on their blog.  I will be lurking in the System Center Virtual Machine Manager newsgroup and answering technical questions and engaged deeply with customers that are a part of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Technology Adoption Program.  I will concentrate over the next few blogs on discussing a reference architecture for building a Virtual Machine Hosting Utility based on Microsoft Virtualization technologies: Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. With the release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager it gives customers the capability of creating resource pools of Virtual Server 2005, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 hosts managing the hosts as a single pool of resources.  This allows the resources to be leveraged as a whole, take deployment for instance creating and deploying a new Virtual Machine within the resource pool. Instead of the administrator deciding what host to place the new Virtual Machine on System Center Virtual Machine Manager can rank and rate the Virtual Server hosts in the resource pool based on the current performance of the Virtual Server hosts and the performance needs of the new Virtual machine (intelligent placement) managing the resource pool as a whole.  So think of this from a hosting viewpoint customers can now deploy resource pools in datacenters for production virtual machine hosting and resource pools for Development and test labs. I am working on a Visio that lays out a architecture that visually represents this approach. I will post the next few blogs based on this type of architecture.

Allen Stewart

Program Manager

Customer Advisory Team

Windows Server Division

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  System Center Virtual Machine Manager (Beta1) was made avialble on http://connect.microsoft.com site....
• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Beta 1 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager is up on the connect.microsoft.com site. More information...