As the countdown to Viridian (Microsoft’s answer to VMware) continues, Microsoft this week announced that its virtualization management piece is about to enter final release.
Specifically, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (SCVMM, or VMM for short) has been released to manufacturing, with general availability set for next month. The version that’s been released to manufacturing will support Microsoft Virtual Server, and will be part of Microsoft’s server management suite, which includes Operations Manager.
It sets in stone the rewrite of beta 2, released last May, which migrated the administrative UI atop Microsoft’s recent Powershell command line interface. As you might recall, Powershell was developed by Microsoft in response to demands from system admins to have the same kind of powerful command line language that Unix admins have enjoyed for years.
The hallmark of VMM is ability to manage virtual images across multiple, as opposed to the single machine that was supported by its predecessor, Systems management Server (SMS).
As part of this announcement, Microsoft also announced that the next version of VMM will support Viridian, the code name for Microsoft’s answer to VMware, plus VMware itself. But as Viridian itself won’t be ready until about 6-7 months after Windows Server 2008’s February rollout, the next version of VMM with the support won’t be released until next fall. Microsoft added that the version of VMM after that (which is due in early 2009) will also support Xen.
At that point, VMM will not only centralize management of multiple Viridian, VMware, and eventually Xen instances across multiple servers, but it also will enable you to convert VMware virtual machines to Viridian’s VHD format.
