Virtual Machine Manager: Frequently Asked Questions

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.

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.

A. Go to Virtual Machine Manager TechCenter site at http://technet.microsoft.com/scvmm/default.aspx to download and learn more about VMM.

A. Yes, both products use the VHD format.

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.

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.

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.

A. Recommended hardware requirements for VMM is posted on the VMM Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx.

A. No, VMM will run standalone and only requires Microsoft SQL Server™ to run.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.