Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager released with few huge announcements

September 7, 2007

The wait is over. I have been blogging about the Virtualization products by Microsoft and also got some ready reference. I also mentioned about the long awaited Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (code named “Carmine”). Now it is finally here. Microsoft has officially announced the release of SCVMM through their Virtualization Team Blog.

There are 4 announcements made:

1. SCVMM released

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

In addition here are some quotes from our Beta and TAP customers:

· “VMM came through for us “Big Time”, I would have been doing this for many hours, 5 min opposed to many hours, what more can I say! VMM was the only reason I got sleep last night!”

· “We hadn’t used System Center software before, but we found it fairly easy to move from Linux to Virtual Server and adopt Virtual Machine Manager because VMM is so well designed and easy to administer.”

· “Virtual Machine Manager handles so many tedious, yet critical, VM infrastructure tasks. It makes VM management so easy, we’re ecstatic.”

· “System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides us with many important benefits. Its centralized management and sophisticated provisioning capabilities make it so much easier for us to manage and enhance our virtual infrastructure.”

2. Pricing / Licensing of SCVMM

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.

3. SCVMM 2007 Workgroup Edition

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 2008.

4. Future Roadmap of SCVMM

Next release is planned to coincide with the release of Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian)

Will be adding support for non-Windows virtualization environments – specifically VMWare and Xen

From a single console and a single command-line you will be able manage Virtual Server, Viridian, VMWare and Xen

Some of the resources that may interest you: