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…

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
3. Managing VI3 with SCVMM considered harmful
4. Two thousand?

While in some contexts the difference is minimal, one obviously affected area is monitoring with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM), which exposes volume GUIDs in various user interfaces:

In related news, an interesting report recently published by a top medical journal found that those in a relatively new information technology position known as “Hyper-V Administrator” exhibited strongly enhanced memory recall capabilities. This correlation is thought to be a result of the rigorous, albeit unintentional, mental training these personnel undergo in the course of their daily responsibilities.

“It appears to be a classic case of the Von Restorff effect,” said Dr. Sedgwick McCaskey, primary contributor to the research and author of the best-seller Don’t Forget IT.

The report also went on to explain that some “Hyper-V Administrators” have found mnemonic devices to be a great help in their jobs. “Instead of trying to remember all of those random letters and numbers, I sometimes make up songs or rhymes,” said one anonymous participant in the study.

It’s great to see nimble professionals that are able to quickly adapt in the face of change. Especially considering the fact that every new Windows Server 2008 R2 system has a hidden 100 MB partition created automatically during installation by default.  And since that volume has no drive letter, it shows up in SCOM with – you guessed it – the volume GUID:

Ouch.  Pass the Ginkgo.

Just to be clear: three paragraphs of this article are satire; the rest is factual.  If you can’t figure out which is which, feel free to ask.

Related posts:

1. Hands off that CSV!
2. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
3. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”
4. Hello Dynamic Memory?

What?

SCVMM is licensed by the number of physical hosts under management — which includes both the Hyper-V and ESX hypervisors.  And, by the way, if you intend to use the “PRO Tips” or any of the other features that require integration with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM), you will need to buy the System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) for $1497 per physical host.

For example, if you have 10 VMware ESX servers in your environment and you decide to integrate SCVMM, you will owe Microsoft $1470 x 10 = $14,970.

When you look closely, the cost of all that free virtualization really starts to add up.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
2. Two thousand?
3. PRO Tips: pros only, please
4. When does your “free” Hyper-V Server cost $1304?

The ad claims that SCVMM can manage both physical and virtual infrastructure. That is flat out untrue. SCVMM cannot manage physical machines — period. It can barely perform any management tasks on the Hyper-V hosts under its control.

I’m sure the point they are trying to make is that if you deploy the entire System Center family (Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, etc.) you will have tools to manage both your physical and virtual machines — but that’s a far cry from VMM managing your physical systems.  The advertisement omits information and misleads consumers. Is that allowed?

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the Federal Trade Commission’s truth-in-advertising rules:

What makes an advertisement deceptive?

According to the FTC’s Deception Policy Statement, an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement – or omits information – that:

• Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and
• Is “material” – that is, important to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product.

Related posts:

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2. When does your “free” Hyper-V Server cost $1304?
3. SCVMM ignores own plank, emphasizes VirtualCenter’s speck
4. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management

Let’s use PowerShell to find out if Microsoft made their release date:

$RtmDate = Get-Date "October 21, 2008"
$MgtPackReleaseDate = Get-Date "January 28, 2009"
$MgtPackDueDate = $RtmDate.AddDays(60)
 
$DaysTaken = $MgtPackReleaseDate.Subtract($RtmDate).Days
$DaysLate = $MgtPackReleaseDate.Subtract($MgtPackDueDate).Days
 
Write-Host "Due date:`t" $MgtPackDueDate.ToShortDateString()
Write-Host "Release date:`t" $MgtPackReleaseDate.ToShortDateString()
Write-Host "Days taken:`t" $DaysTaken
Write-Host "Days late:`t" $DaysLate

Results:

Due date:        12/20/2008
Release date:    1/28/2009
Days taken:      99
Days late:       39

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1. Wild SCVMM 2008 R2 rumors and speculation
2. Hello, SCVMM 2008 R2
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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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1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
2. Two thousand?
3. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
4. Say it ain’t so, PRO!

Operations Manager 2007’s value diminishes when managing non-Microsoft IT elements, whether management is provided by Microsoft or a third party.

Sort of reminds me of the value of SCVMM-VirtualCenter integration, but that’s another topic.

Something that really caught my eye is that the product has racked up 4000 licenses in the year-and-a-half that it has been available.  But, if you know the product architecture, you would concur that most sites require several licenses.  That implies about 2000 SCOM 2007 sites, to make a reasonable estimate.

Is that a lot?  Perhaps, since Gartner found one strength to be “A significant installed base.”

Consider this:  To take advantage of the highly-advertised SCVMM features like PRO Tips, topology diagrams and reporting (well, in 60 days…) you need to integrate with SCOM.  Does that mean that there are just a couple thousand environments out there that are actually ready to deploy Microsoft virtualization?

Are you one of the two thousand?  What about everyone else?  Read up on SCOM architecture and deployment just to get started with virtualization?  Doubtful.  For those with real work to do, today, take a look at VMware Infrastructure with a free 60-day trial.  You can use VMware DRS right away to intelligently place virtual machines on hosts and even move them around with zero downtime.  Kind of like PRO Tips, without the quick migration downtime and all the moving parts of SCOM:

Root Management Server?  Clusters?  Report Server?  Management Servers?  DW DB?  Agents?  Please pass the Tylenol.

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
3. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
4. Say it ain’t so, PRO!