Virtual Machine Manager: Frequently Asked Questions
Published: May 22, 2006 | Updated: October 24, 2007
This FAQ answers commonly asked questions about Virtual Machine Manager. Click a question to view its answer.
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General Information Questions
Q. What is System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007?
A. Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized data center that enables increased physical server utilization and centralized management of virtual machines. VMM makes possible straightforward and fast server consolidation on virtual machine infrastructure, rapid Physical-2-Virtual conversion, swift provisioning of new virtual machines and Intelligent Placement of workloads. Featuring cross-platform integration with the familiar tools of System Center, Virtual Machine Manager is a great solution for using your Information Technilogy (IT) Department’s existing administrative skills with physical servers as they embrace a virtualized environment.
Q. When will Virtual Machine Manager be available to customers?
A. Beta 2 is publically available now. RTM of the product will be in Q3 of 2007. Virtual Machine Manager is available now as a trial download. The product will become available to Enterprise customers in October 2007 and a standalone version for the small and medium business customers will be available in January 2008.
Q. How can customers download the Virtual Machine Manager trial?
Q. Will it be possible to move virtual machines from Virtual Server installations to Windows Server Virtualization?
A. Yes, both products use the VHD format.
Features and Functionality Questions
Q. What is the support for non-Windows operating systems?
A. VMM does support operating systems not running Windows running on a Windows Server® Virtualization platform. Operating systems not running Windows can be started, stopped, stored in the library and migrated. However, there will not be support for physical to virtual conversion or customization of the virtual machines of operating systems not running Windows.
Q. Will VMM scale? How much?
A. Yes. A single VMM environment is designed and tested to support hundreds of physical virtualization hosts and thousands of guest operating systems running on those hosts.
Q. What languages will Virtual Machine Manager be available in?
A. Beta 2 will be English only. VMM will RTM with support for eight additional languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, and Korean.
Q. What hardware is required to run Virtual Machine Manager?
Q. Does the Virtual Machine Manager require System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager or Data Protection Manager?
A. No, VMM will run standalone and only requires Microsoft SQL Server™ to run.
Q. Is Microsoft SQL Server included with Virtual Machine Manager?
A. Yes, during setup the administrator can either choose an existing instance of SQL Server to use or VMM will install a local version of SQL Server Express.
Q. What virtualization platforms does the Virtual Machine Manager run on?
A. Virtual Machine Manager 2007 manages installations running on Virtual Server 2005 R2 and R2 SP1. The next release of Virtual Machine Manager will support Windows Server virtualization running with Windows Server 2008 and also VMware ESX servers.
Q. Will Virtual Machine Manager 2007 support the Windows Server virtualization Beta running on Windows Server 2008?
A. Virtual Machine Manager 2007 does not currently manage Windows Server virtualization. VMM will support Windows Server virtualization in the public beta of VMM R2. This public beta is currently planned for Q1 2008.
Q. How does Virtual Machine Manager integrate with System Center Operations Manager?
A. Operations Manager is used to identify what we call consolidation candidates. To identify the appropriate workloads for virtualization it is not as simple as listing all of the servers which are currently requiring low CPU. There are issues of “spiky” or high variance workloads and high I/O workloads which must be taken into consideration. The performance data stored in Operations Manager is used to create a consolidation candidates report that takes all of these issues under consideration. Also, Operations Manager is the enterprise monitoring solution for both physical and virtual machine infrastructure. VMM doesn’t create an additional, parallel monitoring system to be configured and supported.
Q. Does Virtual Machine Manager require Active Directory?
A. Yes, Active Directory® Domain Services is required for security purposes to ensure that access to images on the network is authenticated and secure. Active Directory also provides tremendous benefits by allowing the VMM administrator to identify and understand all the physical servers running virtual machines that are installed in the customer environment and the use of Distributed File System to replicate images automatically across the network.
Q. Does VMM enable downtime migration of workloads across physical servers?
A. Yes, when used with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, VMM supports Quick Migration. The migration wizard will also automatically detect SAN infrastructure and will enable the IT administrator to choose to migrate VMs over SAN. When used with a SAN infrastructure, the length of the service interruption using Quick migration will depend only on the size of the Virtual Machine's memory, as that will determine the time it takes to pause the Virtual Machine for migration.
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