During the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas last week Microsoft announced the public Beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, the successor of System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 and evolving into a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) management tool.
Most of the features were already detailed in November last year (here and here), and this version also includes the Server App-V functionality, which Microsoft made available in a Community Technology Preview (CTP) in December last year, also announcing that Server App-V will become available as a complementary technology to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.
"Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) builds on the technology used in client Application Virtualization, allowing for the separation of application configuration and state from the underlying operating system in a data center environment. Server App-V converts traditional server applications into “XCopyable” images without requiring code changes to the applications themselves."
This beta version provides the following functionalities:
- Fabric Management
- The ability to deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters and to orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
- Adding and managing Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters without the need of a management platform
- The ability to manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
- Classification of storage, Storage Pools and LUNs management
- Resource Optimization
- Ability to proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
- Ability to schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads by powerering the rest off until they are needed.
- Integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors using Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO)
- Cloud Management
- Abstracting server, network and storage resources into private clouds
- Delegation of access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
- Self-service usage for application administrators to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
- Service Lifecycle Management
- Service templates in order to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and application packages
- Composing operating system images and applications during service deployment
- Scaling out the number of virtual machines in a service
- Service performance and health monitoring integration with System Center Operations Manager
- Decoupling OS image and application updating through image-based servicing.
- Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V
SCVMM 2012 will drop support for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, and VMware ESX/ESXi 3.0.