Not much.

First Things First

Before you can use PRO to Live Migrate virtual machines between hosts (which is sort of the whole point), you need to first configure Hyper-V, failover clustering, and Cluster Shared Volumes — something eWeek found to be significantly more complicated than VMware ESX.

After Hyper-V and Live Migration are up and running, the next step is to install SCVMM 2008 R2 so you can integrate it with your System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) environment.

What’s that?  You don’t have SCOM deployed?  Go ahead and set it up.  Come back in a few days when you’re ready to go to the next step.

Integration Time

After your environment has both SCVMM and SCOM up and running, it’s integration time! If you have ever thought that the next-next-finish Microsoft wizards were boring, then this is the task for you.  You’ll get a chance to make configuration changes to various systems and possibly even Active Directory — haven’t you always wanted to learn about the SetSPN utility anyway?

But don’t let me spoil the excitement by giving away the ending — pick up your own copy of the 34-page integration guide and experience the thrill for yourself.

Second Opinion

Some of you are probably thinking that this is an exaggeration, it can’t be all that bad.  Let’s take a look from another perspective, presented in the Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide for SCVMM 2008 R2:

As you can see from the above excerpt, integrating SCVMM with SCOM clearly increases the time, effort, and complexity of your virtualization deployment.  And don’t forget that SCOM is required for monitoring your Hyper-V infrastructure, too.

Unlike the Microsoft virtualization conglomeration, VMware DRS is an integral part of vCenter Server — purpose-built for virtualization.  Talk about additional layers…

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Microsoft Hyper-V R2 derives HA clustering capabilities and Live Migration from the additional Windows Failover Clustering layer that can be added to the hypervisor.  With all that integration, you might think a remote console connection would seamlessly fail over along with the VM during a Live Migration.

Sorry, not in this release. Is it an omission, or just a bug?  Time will tell.

Now that System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 (SCVMM) PRO tips can be used to automate Live Migration — if it is integrated with System Center Operations Manger 2007 (SCOM), that is — administrators connected to a remote VM console may find themselves suddenly cut off.

See it in action in this short video:

Oh, sure it’s not hard to go back into SCVMM, find the VM, and reconnect — but should you have to do that manually?  VM remote consoles may not be needed for day-to-day administrative tasks, but is that reasonable justification to ignore usability and integration?

Because the Microsoft Virtualization solution is a conglomeration of various components — Windows Server, hypervisor role, Failover Clustering, SCVMM, SCOM, etc. — it is much more difficult to provide a seamless experience.  This remote console issue is really just an indicator.

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The VMware Performance Team has repeatedly demonstrated how vSphere is the superior platform for your production workloads.  Check out the latest article on the VROOM! blog for all the details.

By running substantially more virtual machines per hypervisor host, VMware provides the lowest cost per application — even less expensive than so-called “free” virtualization solutions.

You might be tempted to compare this tremendous success with first-generation offerings from other virtualization vendors, such as Citrix WLB or SCVMM PRO Tips.  Coincidentally, both of those other solutions are not integrated –the resource balancing is performed by an external system that is monitoring virtual machine performance.  DRS is part of VMware vCenter and purpose-built for the virtual environment.

Note: the version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that supports live migration is not slated to be available until late December 2009.  That means Microsoft virtualization environments cannot yet even attempt to accomplish what VMware does today.  And by today, I mean June 2006.

Meet the Engineer

In this video you can hear one of the main engineers behind VMware DRS:

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I turned on PRO Tips for my ESX cluster and it looks like there is something my PRO doesn’t know:

That there is a host, not a virtual machine.  Well, at least that explains why PRO could not migrate it.  I’ve not seen VMware DRS try to migrate a host before.

Now that’s what I call P2V.

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4. Shipping is a feature, too

I was particularly interested in PRO Tips, which is consistently mentioned as a key benefit of SCVMM.  It is supposed to compete with VMware DRS, except that PRO relies on System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) while DRS is simply an easy-to-use feature of VirtualCenter. 

Considering the importance of this feature, I expected to see one of the labs cover the SCVMM-SCOM integration and PRO Tips.  No such luck.  We spent time applying hotfixes and rebooting Windows Server 2008 to install the Hyper-V role and other Deep-Dive topics like that.

Instead, PRO Tips received a couple PowerPoint slides and some hand waving about how great it is to be able to automatically migrate your virtual machines – and introduce downtime thanks to quick migration.

I did appreciate the fact that the instructor acknowledged this serious omission.  He intended to at least demonstrate PRO Tips in action, but resources fell short.

If PRO Tips cannot be covered in two days, due to the complexity of SCOM integration, who in the world is really going to be deploying Microsoft virtualization with all of the advertised features?  Probably just the two thousand.

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