Microsoft ships RTM of first SCVMM to work with Hyper-V

Several months after the company began its first shipment of its hardware-supported virtualization platform, Microsoft has officially closed development of its premium management console for that platform.

Up to now, many enterprises that had already adopted Hyper-V -- Microsoft's hardware-supported virtualization platform for Windows Server -- have been relying on a release candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the only working management software for Hyper-V, to get them by. At last, the time for walking that tightrope is over, with the release to manufacturing of the final SCVMM 2008.

"Through the SCVMM 2008 console, administrators can see the entirety of their data center infrastructure -- physical or virtual," reads a blog post today from Zane Adam, Sr., who now directs virtualization strategy for Microsoft. "SCVMM 2008 facilitates key functions like P2V (physical to virtual) migration, Intelligent Placement (selecting the best virtual host for a VM), and managing Hyper-V host clusters, to name just a few. SCVMM 2008 works closely with its siblings -- particularly [System Center Operations Manager] -- in identifying consolidation candidates and in Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), a new feature in which SCVMM 2008 can alert and recommend solutions to administrators about failing virtual machines or hardware."

Adam cites figures from analyst firm IDC that say that during the second quarter of this year, some 23% of new license shipments for virtualization packages was comprised of solutions blending Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft's free VM administration console. VS 2005 is significantly more limited than SCVMM, which maintains active virtual machines on a much more granular, "heartbeat" level -- the way you'd expect a data server cluster to be managed -- and which enables migration of running VMs across processor boundaries.

It's not quite the same as the live migration that Microsoft's biggest competitor, virtualization leader VMware, uses; but Microsoft may be able to make a value proposition now based on real cost benefits, rather than the promise of future ones.