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System Center Virtual Machine Manager RTM

Friday, 07 September 2007 by Michel Roth

Microsoft has RTMed the next part of the System Center family: System Center Virtual Machine Manager, or SCVMM for short. SCVMM is kind of like the Virtual Center for Microsoft Virtual Server and of course the upcoming Windows Server Virtualization. Kind of is kind of a keyword here because SCVMM is very much a part of the entire System Center family of course. Somehow System Center makes me think of Transformers... Remember those Autobots or Decepticons that belonged to a particular group and could together transform to some giant uber Transformer? Well, that's what System Center sounds like to me sometimes. Whether or not this giant robot is a good brave Autobot or a evil, out for world domination Decepticon is out in the open for now... ;-)

The analogy really is quite true. SCVMM can work together with several other components of the System Center "suite". Integration with Operations Manager provides health monitoring, performance monitoring, eventing/alerts. System Center Configuration Manager allows for patching of VMs (for running as well as powered down/suspended VMS) And finally Data Protection Manager provides in the necessary backup/restore functionality.

All this great sounding functionality of course isn't free but I think Microsoft has tasted the atmosphere on the market pretty well and comes up with some competitive deals:

The System Center Management Suite Enterprise
At $860 per physical host you get Enterprise server management licenses for System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Note that this license is on the physical host and includes unlimited VMs running on that host (we need bigger boxes!).

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Workgroup edition
SCVMM (and just SCVMM) for 5 physical servers at the cost of $499. Suspected Availability January 2008.

SCVMM isn't going to be new for long because the team at Microsoft responsible for SCVMM is hard at work on the next version which is aimed at a release to coincide with the Viridian time frame. Brave... This new version will aim to be a single management solution that manages all the different hypervisor technologies: Virtual Server, Viridian, VMWare and Xen. Again, brave....