SCVMM 2008 is released!

Well, if you’re wondering why this blog has gone “dark” for the past few weeks, now you know. We’ve been working very hard to get SCVMM 2008 out the door and today I’m proud to announce that we’ve officially released SCVMM 2008! I want to thank all of our early adopter customers (thousands of you) for helping make this day possible. You all provided fantastic feedback and ultimately, you’ve helped us ensure SCVMM 2008 is the product that you need it to be.

I’ve blogged at length about the various new features in SCVMM 2008 but let me just very quickly recap some of the highlights.

Comprehensive Hypervisor Management – SCVMM 2007 already lets you manage Virtual Server and now we’ve added support for Hyper-V (including Hyper-V Server) and even VMware based environments (ESX and 3i) through a single management console and a single Powershell command line interface. If you’ve been using virtualization for some time now, chances are that you have some VMware. If you have Windows Server 2008 deployed, you already have Hyper-V. Now, with SCVMM 2008, you can manage both in a seamless and fully integrated way – every feature of SCVMM works against each of the supported virtualization platforms but we still enable features specific to each including Quick Migration on Hyper-V and Vmotion on VMware.

Physical Resource Optimization (PRO) – By integrating the application specific knowledge provided by System Center Operations Manager, SCVMM allows you to calibrate your resource assignments based upon the real-time demands of your datacenter. Rather than migrating VMs around based on generic metrics like CPU and memory utilization, we’ve worked closely with partners to provide you with the best possible information (specific to your environment) before making changing to your infrastructure. In the coming weeks, look for new SCVMM PRO partners announcements on this blog.

Delegated Administration - SCVMM allows you to segment your environment and assign management authorization to each segment to different Active Directory users and/or groups. In addition, SCVMM provides an integrated web-based self-service user interface allowing authorized users to provision and manage their own virtual machines. Administrators can control which templates these users can provision VMs from, determine which actions they are allowed to take and even assign quotas for chargeback purposes.

Highly Available Virtual Machines – SCVMM makes enabling high availability for virtual machines as simple as a single click. Our intelligent placement feature ensures that the VM is deployed or migrated only to a highly available physical host (using Windows clustering for Hyper-V or VMware HA for ESX) and configures the VM for high availability on that host.

Integrated Physical and Virtual Machine Management – SCVMM isn’t an island – it is part of the comprehensive System Center family of products. System Center allows you to patch, monitor, back up, deploy and manage your entire physical and virtual infrastructure.

There are many more terrific features in SCVMM 2008 and we look forward to your feedback. The team is very proud of this release and we’re excited to get it into the hands of our customers. It’s no secret that we feel management will be the key differentiator when it comes to virtualization adoption and future datacenter initiatives. Thanks again for your help and support with this release. For additional information on today’s announcement, check out https://blogs.technet.com/virtualization

 Rakesh