What's New in Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Applies To: Virtual Machine Manager 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 is a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized datacenter, enabling increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator, delegated administrator, and authorized end-users. Following is an overview of the new features included in VMM 2008.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Management

With VMM 2008, you can create and manage virtual machines running on Hyper-V hosts. When adding hosts, if you add a host that is running Windows Server 2008 and does not have Hyper-V enabled, VMM 2008 will automatically enable the Hyper-V role on the host for you.

VMware Management

With VMM 2008, you can create and manage virtual machines running on VMware ESX Server host. By adding your VMware VirtualCenter Server to VMM 2008, you can now manage all of your virtual hosts from a single console.

VMM 2008 provides most VirtualCenter Server functionality including VMotion. Additionally, VMM 2008 enhances your VMware servers with features, such as Automatic Placement and Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO).

For more information, see Managing a VMware Infrastructure in VMM.

Delegated Administration with User Roles

In VMM 2008, administrators control access to hosts through user roles. There are three user roles in VMM 2008: Administrator, Delegated Administrator, and Self-Service. The Administrator user role grants users administrative rights across the entire environment. The Delegated Administrator user role grants users administrative permissions within a scoped environment. The Self-Service user role determines what actions users can take on their own virtual machines using a Web interface: the Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal. The Self-Service user role may be assigned a quota to limit the number of virtual machines the user can create.

For more information, see Managing User Roles.

Clustering Management

VMM 2008 has added management support for Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters for Hyper-V. VMM 2008 is cluster-aware when adding hosts, meaning you can discover what clusters are available through Active Directory. Additionally, you can easily create highly available virtual machines that run on a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

For more information, see Configuring Host Clusters in VMM to Support Highly Available Virtual Machines.

Improved Resource Calibration and Optimization

Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) leverages integration between VMM 2008 and System Center Operations Manager to alert users of potentially troublesome situations. Users can have Virtual Machine Manager take corrective action, either manually or automatically, as issues arise.

For more information, see Enabling PRO in VMM.