As virtualization continues to become widely adopted throughout organizations large and small, the virtualization war has moved from beyond the hypervisor to the management of virtual machines and virtual infrastructure. A quick look at the VMworld sessions which just wrapped up this week and one will see a series of sessions around management, design and configuration more than sessions on how to virtual specific applications or hypervisor centric topics.
Microsoft has been in the management business for years with their popular System Center product and is working on a major update expected sometime next year. Today System Center manages both physical and virtual environments and includes products such as Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Configuration Manager and Data Protection Manager. System Center 2012 will include additional components such as Orchestrator, Microsoft's workflow orchestration tool that was obtained in their Opalis acquisition and AppController, delivering applications out to businesses by providing insight into SCVMM (private) and Azure (public) clouds.
System Center 2012 will also include many new enhancements to existing products as well such as Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 which will have dynamic optimization and power optimization to perform resource balancing between cluster hosts or automatically turn hosts off or on as needed. You can also create a Private Cloud by combining hosts, networking and storage resources to be managed together. Storage management will be made possible through the use of SMI-S and tools such as Self Service Portal (SSP) for deploying VMs and services has been integrated into the VMM management console.
Interested in learning more or downloading Beta software or even a pre-configured VHD containing System Center software?
Go to the following sites for more information or access to beta software such as:
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