SCVMM

March 31, 2010 | 4 comments

A year ago at MMS 2009, Microsoft criticized VMware for not offering public-private cloud federation. Today, Microsoft still has nothing to show in that area.

December 3, 2009 | 14 comments

While Microsoft marketing material claims Hyper-V and SCVMM can transfer large virtual machine files and templates over a SAN, the truth is that all VM transfers are done over the network. Only VMware ESX leverages high-speed storage area networking for VM migration.

November 18, 2009 | 12 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers multiple options for expanding virtual machine storage with zero downtime, including the ability to grow a running virtual disk. Hyper-V marketing literature makes a similar claim, but is limited to simply adding another virtual disk.

November 10, 2009 | 19 comments

According to Microsoft's own documentation, integrating SCOM with SCVMM adds high complexity and additional cost to your virtualization environment.

October 15, 2009 | 5 comments

When a Hyper-V virtual machine console is connected and a live migration is initiated -- automatically with PRO Tips or manually -- the remote client disconnects. The situation must be resolved manually by the administrator, unlike VMware ESX, which seamlessly migrates remote console connections during VMotion.

August 25, 2009 | 4 comments

It makes for great drama to say that VMware will not allow Microsoft Virtualization to exhibit their latest product -- but it is not true.

August 24, 2009 | 2 comments

Originally promised within 60 days of Hyper-V R2, today MSFT announced availability of SCVMM 2008 R2.

August 10, 2009 | 18 comments

Do not believe the hype from Microsoft execs about System Center single pane of glass management. The loosely integrated tools require administrators to use numerous interfaces.

July 23, 2009 | 13 comments

Unlike Storage VMotion from VMware, Quick Storage Migration requires a VM to suspend and be unavailable for a period of time, making it unsuitable for production.

July 22, 2009 | 15 comments

With SCVMM, VM templates are generalized with Sysprep before storing in the image library -- the original VM is destroyed and cannot be updated. vCenter only Syspreps after cloning.

July 15, 2009 | 3 comments

It’s really getting out of hand — crazy rumors and speculation surrounding the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 release date are indeed baffling. Take the following example*, where an anonymous author had the audacity to say: It is our goal that the final (RTM) version of SCVMM 2008 R2 will ship within 60 days of [...]

June 12, 2009 | 9 comments

It is very difficult to cleanly shut down a Linux VM on Hyper-V if it is configured for HA. This is because there is no orderly guest shutdown feature in the integration components.

June 1, 2009 | 7 comments

Over the past few months, VCritical has climbed in the Google search rankings for certain virtualization-related queries.  One especially notable search term is SCVMM, since there are quite a few articles written about that product on VCritical.  In fact, VCritical normally appears on the first page of Google search results for SCVMM — result number [...]

April 24, 2009 | 5 comments

One of the greatest things about virtual machines is the ability to take snapshots, which can be used to quickly roll a VM back to a known state. Previously, I have written about some of the shortcomings with Microsoft’s Hyper-V snapshots.  Or were they checkpoints?  I forget… but that’s not important.  The main problem with the [...]

April 20, 2009 | 7 comments

System Center Virtual Machine Manager is licensed per physical host -- Hyper-V or VMware ESX -- at a cost of $1497 each.

April 16, 2009 | No comments

SCVMM adds a custom attribute to VirtualCenter (vCenter).

April 14, 2009 | 1 comment

Yesterday, Network World published this article: Microsoft’s SC-VMM provides limited view of VMware-based VMs.  I’ve quoted some of the best parts and followed each with some additional resources to reinforce the author’s points. Using SC VMM to initially make a VM image instance wasn’t easy or intuitive. Ahh, that sounds like this issue regarding VMware ESX provisioning [...]

April 6, 2009 | 8 comments

When you centrally manage multiple virtualization hosts, what measures can be taken to protect the manager itself from outages?  While availability could be a concern at first glance, a management platform like VMware vCenter can generally tolerate a short outage without too many folks noticing — VM workloads would never be affected.  One exception is [...]

March 13, 2009 | 19 comments

In a failed effort to acknowledge viability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Microsoft is caught posting false comments on VCritical.

March 10, 2009 | 7 comments

Yesterday I wrote a summary of the hazards of using SCVMM to manage VI3 — highlighting previously published VCritical articles as well as linking to a new series of videos on Why Choose VMware.  Looks like VMware may have hit a nerve, as the Microsoft virtualization team scrambled to issue a barrage of rebuttals. My work [...]

March 9, 2009 | 6 comments

Features found in VMware ESX are unnecessarily neutered when attempting to manage by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

February 19, 2009 | 3 comments

Hyper-V Linux guests (SUSE) do not yet have integration components or customization capabilities. Nor can you P2V a Linux system to Hyper-V.

February 3, 2009 | 1 comment

System Center Virtual Machine Manager is limited to managing virtual machines (VMs). Claims that SCVMM can manage physical infrastructure are misleading.

January 29, 2009 | No comments

The System Center Operations Manager Management Pack (MP) for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was finally released yesterday.  As I wrote previously, the documentation was initially misleading on this feature — eventually we learned that the MP would ship 60 days after SCVMM 2008 released. Let’s use PowerShell to find out if Microsoft made their [...]

January 23, 2009 | No comments

Are you using VMM?  Don’t answer yet — trick question. I just saw an email come across with “VMM” in the subject.  No, it wasn’t about that VMM, it was something else.  Then I saw Scott Lowe’s tweet about VMM beta 1.5.  No, this isn’t that VMM, either.  Whoa, off the top of my head I [...]

January 22, 2009 | 1 comment

Although SLES 10 is supposedly supported by SCVMM 2008, administrators must look elsewhere for a Linux guest customization solution.

January 9, 2009 | 2 comments

By design, System Center Virtual Machine Manager copies ISO CD/DVD images to managed hosts instead of sharing. For VMware ESX it uses SFTP. For ESXi, it fails.

January 8, 2009 | 4 comments

I came across this forum post today where a person is trying to evaluate SCVMM and Virtual Server — all running inside an ESX VM.  Apparently, the performance is bad… Doh! At least someone responded with this helpful analogy: It’s like buying a walk-in refrigerator and then putting a smaller one inside of it.

January 5, 2009 | 3 comments

When System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) connects to VirtualCenter/vCenter, several changes are made. Learn how to recover everything with PowerShell.

December 29, 2008 | No comments

Wow, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) sure plays rough with VirtualCenter vCenter.  I found that every time I restart the SCVMM server it kills all VI Client connections. That is not very nice.  But then again, neither was deleting my ESX templates.

December 23, 2008 | 1 comment

Users that wish to implement Hyper-V CPU reservations and limits are forced to open another tool, Hyper-V Manager, instead of configure these with SCVMM.

December 18, 2008 | 1 comment

Although the Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM allow removing snapshots from running VMs, they are not actually merged until the VM is powered off.

December 15, 2008 | 5 comments

VMware ESX virtual machine networking is pretty straightforward.  A virtual switch (vSwitch) is created on each host by default and is associated with one or more physical NICs.  When multiple physical NICs are used, virtual machines benefit from added redundancy and load balancing by simply connecting to such a vSwitch. However, VMs don’t connect directly to [...]

December 9, 2008 | 1 comment

When using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage VMware ESX, VMs are removed from their resource pools during migration with VMotion.

December 9, 2008 | No comments

I happened to stumble across this item via Technorati recently: photos from the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 ship party.  The first thing that came to mind was the infamous quote from Mike Neil last year, “Shipping is a feature, too.” Getting software out the door is about prioritization and tradeoffs.  Did they get it [...]

December 8, 2008 | 1 comment

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT). Picture this: you finally have your shiny new Hyper-V cluster configured, after asking your SAN administrator to create a LUN for you.  You create a virtual machine on that LUN and test the quick migration failover from one node to another.  It works.  So [...]

December 4, 2008 | No comments

I’m still taking in all of the sights and sounds of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.  The What’s New page is very interesting.  Some of the things listed are apparently even in the product.  But not this: Thoroughly redesigned and rebuilt Web interface for the self-service portal, including user access to the PowerShell interface [...]

December 4, 2008 | No comments

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT). This next group of keywords are due to an unfortunate design problem with Microsoft SCVMM and Hyper-V:  ISO images are copied from the image library to individual VM directories on SAN storage before connecting. “share image file instead of copying it” mount iso scvmm scvmm does not [...]

December 3, 2008 | 1 comment

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: What’s the difference between a checkpoint and a snapshot?

November 21, 2008 | 4 comments

As you know from reading previous posts, I am currently checking out System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.  Of course, my test environment also has VMware VirtualCenter Server and a couple of ESX hosts. I turned on PRO Tips for my ESX cluster and it looks like there is something my PRO doesn’t know:

November 20, 2008 | 4 comments

I recently had the opportunity to attend a two-day Microsoft training class on Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008.  This was a typical Microsoft course with hands-on labs and was billed as a Technical Deep-Dive – whatever that means. I was particularly interested in PRO Tips, which is consistently mentioned as a key benefit of SCVMM.  It is [...]

November 19, 2008 | 1 comment

Gartner recently published a report with some interesting details on System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).  One of the three key findings: 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.

November 14, 2008 | 3 comments

This afternoon I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to integrate System Center Operations Manager reporting with my SCVMM 2008 evaluation setup. I dutifully read the documentation which led me around in circles to various Microsoft websites.  Download the management pack?  It doesn’t seem to exist.  The one for SCVMM 2007?  That doesn’t seem right. Check Google… I [...]

November 13, 2008 | No comments

Spell checkers are great, aren’t they?  We have come to rely on them.  As I was writing yesterday’s post I encountered something amusing and wanted to share it with you.  It is a good reminder not to be too quick in accepting suggestions from a computer! I actually feel a bit sorry for SCVMM.  ALL of [...]

November 12, 2008 | 4 comments

In my ongoing probe of the newly-released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM), I have stumbled across something that stuck me as more than just a little hypocritical. First, some background: Microsofties have gone out of their way this year to emphasize that environments with multiple VMware VirtualCenter Servers are in great pain.  A pain [...]

October 31, 2008 | 8 comments

VirtualCenter/vCenter administrators need to be aware of the fact that templates are completely deleted from the ESX datastore when using SCVMM "import" feature.

October 29, 2008 | No comments

Both VMware VirtualCenter and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) come in an entry-level edition for sites that are not yet at enterprise deployment levels.  VMware calls their offering Foundation and Microsoft’s is Workgroup Edition.  Similarly, both vendors also offer free, time-limited evaluations of their enterprise products.

October 27, 2008 | 19 comments

A surprising feature of SCVMM and Hyper-V is the requirement to copy multi-gigabyte ISO image files from the library server to individual VM directories on SAN storage instead of sharing a single instance.

October 21, 2008 | No comments

Well, today’s the day.  The announcements have begun:  SCVMM is finally out.  I’m kind of waiting for someone to say Microsoft released it “early,” since the (latest) announced stated end of October. Brace yourself for a tidal wave of FUD from Redmond that perhaps only the Linux community has known.  Here are a couple examples for [...]

October 17, 2008 | 4 comments

Microsoft Hyper-V Server is finally out.  We sure heard a lot about the new Windows-less hypervisor this year and how it was definitely not Windows.  Well, that turned out to be a bunch of marketing spin.  Not only is it just Windows, it even requires you to install some Internet Explorer security patches.  Huh? It would [...]