At the recent Microsoft Management Summit 2011, which took place in lovely Las Vegas, NV, the company spoke about improvements to many of its existing cloud and virtual management programs, among them System Center. The SC 2012 release is slated to have a large number of improvements, most of those concentrated in the Virtual Machine Management (VMM) product. Here’s the best of what’s coming up.
First and foremost, the new VMM will be able to manage multiple hypervisors. Not only that, but these hypervisors don’t have to be ones that are owned or run by Microsoft – support for Citrix and VMware hypervisors will be included, although the new VMM will no longer support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. In addition, VMM is also going to be getting Dynamic Optimization, which will allow it to provide workload-level balancing on VMs, something that is rapidly becoming a higher priority as the cloud expands and server efficiencies begin to drop. Power Optimization is also coming, which will allow companies to better manage the power use of their VMs.
The new VMM 2012 is also going to include support for cloud, fabric and services management, which speaks to the commitment that Microsoft has to encouraging cloud growth – both public and private. Cluster awareness and enhanced placement rules are coming as well, both aimed at making the most of VMs rather than simply slapping down data anywhere and contributing to virtual server sprawl. Upgrade support will be present as well, allowing consumers to easily get upgrades to VMM as new versions and fixes are released.
While the new VMM won’t be perfect, it’s a step in the right direction for a company that is looking to make the most of cloud services.
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