System Center Virtual Machine Manager Background and Installation

Monday, July 28, 2008

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Background and Installation

Ask the Core Team - System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 – Installation

“Virtual Machine Manager (“VMM”) is a manager of Windows Virtual Machines (“VM”) and the Hosts (physical machines) on which the VMs reside. Depending on hardware configuration, a single Host can house several VMs. A large volume of the calls we receive at Microsoft are around installation and operation - the goal of this blog is to cover each.

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The newer console-based VMM is faster, and adds several features, such as more reliable conversion of physical to virtual machines (“P2V”), faster deployment of VMs, and centralized monitoring of several hosts AND their VMs. You can tailor the VMM interface to several levels of granularity and filtering, making managing several hosts and their VMs customizable to what works best for you. VMM manages your virtual hard drives (“vhd”), images, deployment scripts, and HW configurations in a centralized “Library.”

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The VMM Components

There are four main components to your VMM deployment:

1. Virtual Machine Manager Server

2. Virtual Machine Library Server

3. Virtual Machine Host

4. Virtual Machine Manager Console

You’ll want to understand each of these and what they do before beginning to set up your deployment.

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This is a little more complicated than I thought. Looks like I have a little homework to do…

It looks like I'll need a "traditional server" to host the VMM Server/Library part? I've got some boxes where I repurpose, but I wonder if I also couldn't put it on a VM on the Win2K8 box I'm getting? Or would that be "bad"? I guess I can start there and re-install on a stand-alone box if need be at a later date. If I do the VMM on a VM I'll need to be careful with the VM Library paths... Can't have those in the VM, for that would indeed be "bad"