System Center Virtual Machine Manager is RTM, in future will support Vmware and XEN SCVMM has been officially released! It has been a long road and as many of our TAP and Beta customers can attest, we have come a long way. It is not easy bringing a competitive version 1 product to market, especially in a newer industry that is moving quickly.
Here are some of the interesting details of the release:
Throughout the release we have had over 32 TAP (Technology Adoption Partners) customers and 10 partners which have been testing, giving great feedback and creating solutions with the beta versions of SCVMM
Microsoft's own internal IT group has been managing 100% of their virtual environment (86 physical hosts running 1224 VMs) in production with SCVMM since Beta2 with no (that is zero) impact on their SLAs
To date we have over 20,678 public beta users of SCVMM
SCVMM is available in 9 different languages
Licensing
We learned from our customers that managing virtualization encompasses many things – provisioning, monitoring, optimizing, reporting, patching and backup/restore. As we looked at the Microsoft assets across these areas, we created integration with some of the existing tools to help cover all the key scenarios for virtualization. We have tight integration with Operations Manager to provide health monitoring, performance monitoring, eventing/alerts, and ultimately the combination of SCVMM and Operations Manager provides a powerful solution to continually optimize your virtualization environment. In addition, with Operations Manager we can see a full picture of how an application running in a VM. We monitor the application and combine that data with the VM and physical host data. For patching the VMs and images, we have integration with Configuration Manager that allows you to patch VMs including the ones not currently running. For backup/restore, we have integration with Data Protection Manager that allows you to backup at the physical host level (which includes all the VMs running on that host).
In order to make it easy for customers to manage their virtual environments and cover the key scenarios – we are announcing a new license to cover that situation. We are announcing the System Center Management Suite Enterprise license which gives you everything you need to manage you virtual environment at a very reasonable price of $860 per physical host.
You get:
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 license
Enterprise server management licenses for System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.
One key thing to note – the license is on the physical host and includes unlimited VMs running on that host. Also – one question I get pretty often is whether or not SCVMM requires the other tools in order to run. The answer is no – SCVMM is stand-alone and does not require the other System Center tools in order to run. Having said that – there are many scenarios that are better and “light-up†when SCVMM is used in conjunction with the other System Center tools.
We are announcing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Workgroup edition, which will be available in January 2008. This edition is aimed at mid-market customers and allows them to manage up to five physical host servers and an unlimited number of virtual machines. The only restriction in the software is the number of physical hosts you can manage (5) but everything else is full functionality. The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Workgroup edition will be priced at $499 and will be available in January.
Future
We are on a long roadmap with SCVMM and continue to get great feedback from customers about where to go. Our next release is planned to coincide with the release of Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) so that we can expose all the great features it provides. In addition to Viridian support – we are also adding some key customer driven features. We have heard loud and clear from customers and partners that we need to manage other virtualization environments in addition to Windows virtualization. They want a single management solution that manages all the different hypervisor technologies. So – in our next set of releases will be adding support for non-Windows virtualization environments – specifically VMWare and Xen. We listened to you!!! And when I say we will manage these environments I mean really manage them – covering all the key scenarios they offer. From a single console and a single command-line you will be able manage Virtual Server, Viridian, VMWare and Xen.
Full Story At Source
Send via e-mail | Submit to Digg | Add to Live Favorites
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/binkdotnu/~3/153144215/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-is-rtm-in-future-will-support-vmware-and-xen.aspx
