As server virtualization becomes more popular, IT professionals are quickly
realizing that migrating some of their company’s resources to a virtualized
infrastructure is only part of the challenge. After virtualizing the resources,
you have to manage them—and handling virtualized servers isn’t the same as
administering physical servers. A physical host server and perhaps a host OS
add an extra layer or two of software between virtual machines (VMs) and the
real world. You can create, alter, and remove VMs with a speed and flexibility that’s unheard
of compared with what you can do with physical servers, but traditional toolsets don’t have
the facilities to handle this added coating of complexity.
Microsoft created System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), which is a component
of the company’s suite of System Center products, to manage a virtual infrastructure;
SCVMM 2008 improves on the original version. SCVMM was designed to integrate into
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 SP1, and if you’re already using SCOM
you can take advantage of a significant new feature in SCVMM 2008 to optimize your virtual
resources.
If you’ve installed the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008 and are already using
Hyper-V Manager, you might wonder whether SCVMM 2008 can benefit you. Hyper-V
Manager provides a simple interface that lets you control the configuration of VMs, one
machine at a time. You can create a VM, start it, change its settings, take snapshots of it,
export it, import it, stop it, and delete it. SCVMM does all that and far more.
SCVMM 2008 Features
SCVMM is a solution for all aspects of
managing a virtual infrastructure. New
features in SCVMM 2008 include Hyper-V
integration, Performance and Resource
Optimization (PRO) and SCOM integration,
VMware ESX Server support, a new
delegated administrator role, and cluster
support.
Hyper-V integration. One of the most
significant new attributes of SCVMM 2008 is
Hyper-V integration. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s
virtualization technology that uses a hypervisor—
a thin layer of software between the
hardware and the OS that lets multiple OSs
run on a host computer at the same time.
Hyper-V features 64-bit architecture and
therefore 64-bit VM support, multiprocessor
VMs, and virtual switched networking—
which is a big step beyond Microsoft Virtual
Server 2005. SCVMM 2008 manages all
aspects of Hyper-V hosts and VMs.
PRO and SCOM. SCVMM 2008 has a
useful feature in its PRO package, which tackles
the problem of balancing VM loads across
multiple servers. PRO is tightly integrated
with SCOM and requires SCOM to function.
You must install SCOM agents on all hosts
and VMs, and you must also install SCVMM
2008 and PRO management packs. With
PRO in place and configured, SCOM will
pass alerts on to SCVMM 2008. A PRO “tip”
noting the problem and a recommended
action appears on the SCVMM console. You
can either manually approve the tip so that
PRO executes it, or, if you set auto-approve,
let PRO take action on its own.
A popular example of a common
resource-management challenge is when
a VM runs out of resources because a host
becomes overloaded. SCOM detects the
overload, passes it to SCVMM 2008, and
generates a PRO tip indicating that you
should move the VM to another host. (PRO
functions on Server 2008 failover host clusters
only.) You determine the recommended
new host by using the Intelligent Placement
feature first introduced in the previous
version of SCVMM. If you turn on autoapprove,
the automation level sets to Critical
Only, which means that only PRO tips with
a critical severity level are automatically
implemented. This setting auto-manages
your host cluster in such situations.
PRO’s capabilities also leverage
SCVMM 2008’s management of VMware
ESX Server. For example, you can define a
policy in PRO that triggers a VMotion VM
migration. Thanks to its integration with
SCOM, however, PRO goes beyond just migrating a heavily used VM to another
host. It understands what’s happening
with the entire stack on Windows VMs—
the host, the VM, and applications running
on the VM.
IT pros sometimes lose sight of the fact
that ultimately it’s the applications and their
health that count rather than the infrastructure.
With PRO’s holistic view of the virtual
environment, you can define policies and
rules that take action on a host (e.g., add
more processor capacity to the VM) because
the application requires it, not just because
the VM shows high utilization.
PRO is also extensible, so Microsoft is
working with its hardware and software
partners to make PRO’s tips intelligent with
regard to the application and hardware configuration.
You can get practical information
about configuring SCVMM to work with SCOM and then with PRO at blogs.technet
.com/m2.
VMware ESX Server support. SCVMM
2008 can now manage VMware ESX servers
through its integration with VirtualCenter.
What this management means is that
SCVMM 2008 can control VirtualCenter’s
popular strengths, such as VMotion, as
well as apply its own features, such as Intelligent
Placement and PRO, to VMware VMs.
(Intelligent Placement is a feature available
in both SCVMM 2007 and SCVMM 2008
that selects the correct host based on the
workload you define for a VM rather than
selecting an available host, creating the VM,
and hoping it fits.) For example, SCVMM
2008’s ESX management is accomplished
through the management of VirtualCenter
itself, not the direct administration of the
ESX hosts. This is because ESX management APIs are available only through VirtualCenter.
Therefore, VirtualCenter Server is
a requirement for managing VMware hosts
and VMs.
Delegated administration. The delegated
administrator is a new role available
to manage hosts and VMs in SCVMM 2008.
A delegated administrator can perform all
the functions of a full administrator but
only on a subset of objects. This kind of job
is useful for people who need to perform
administrative functions on some but not
all hosts managed by SCVMM. This role has
broader administrative rights than the selfservice
user role. You can control the selfservice
user role according to what types
of functions are allowed on a per-VM basis,
whereas the delegated administrator has
full rights on a predefined scope of host
servers and libraries. For example, you could delegate administration rights to manage
hosts and libraries for a particular region.
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