Why we decided to manage VMware and what that means

  • Article

Since we announced a few months back that our next release of VMM (VNext) would manage VMware, I've received lots of questions with respect to why we made this decision and what "manage VMware" really means. Let me walk you through some of the reasoning and thinking.

1) Customers - The primary reason that we decided to manage VMware was, quite frankly, because customers were asking for it. Personally I take this as a compliment to our management suite given that most if not all VMware customers are already using VMware's management tools. The fact that they want our tools to work on top of VMware's OS platform tells me that there's a definite opportunity to innovate and do a better job and we're fully committed to doing this....which leads to my next point.

2) We think we can do a better job - At the end of the day, it's not about managing virtual machines. It's about managing applications and services and today, many if not most of those run on Windows. Understanding the application in detail is absolutely critical to making intelligent management decisions. For example, migrating a VM when the CPU spikes to 80% for 10 minutes is not a particularly smart way to make that decision but if the VM is a 'black box' to you, it's the only choice that you have. With our management tools, you'll be able to set policies and rules based on application specific criteria. For example, if the average amount of time it takes for your order entry system to process an order exceeds 10 seconds and CPU is the reason, add more CPU capacity to the VM. Our customers are telling us that this is much more powerful and relevant. We feel strongly that with Hyper-V, our platform and our management tools provide an excellent end to end solution. With that said, we know that you have investments in VMware but even in that case, our management 'engine' can make better decisions on the VMware platform. In addition, the System Center family of products gives you the ability to manage physical servers right alongside your virtual machines with a single set of integrated tools rather than creating a new silo or island within your organization.

3) Flexibility in Hypervisors with a single management solution - As I said above, we feel very confident that our hypervisor provides the best platform in the vast majority of customer use cases (that's for you to decide of course) but regardless, customers want to use a single management tool in mixed environments. You'll also be able to automate across hypervisors using a single Powershell interface that we provide. VMM will abstract the difference in hypervisor APIs for you. You simply run the "Stop-VM" cmdlet and we make sure that regardless of the hypervisor platform, the VM is stopped. No more code blocks that read "If (VMware)....elseif (VirtualServer)......elseif (Hyper-V)......"

Finally, I want to emphasize that when we say "manage VMware", we mean that day to day, you'll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we'll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you'll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS.

We'll share more details, screenshots and demos very soon....

Rakesh

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    If you haven't already, I recommend reading Rakesh's post on why the System Center team decided to build out V2 of SCVMM so that customers can manage VMware ESX Server and VI3. Here's an excerpt: Flexibility in Hypervisors with a single management solution

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Duas notícias hoje: O Rodrigo já fez um post sobre o System Center Operations Manager 2007

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Adding to Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V , two additional products that support virtualization will launch

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The hypervisor support in Server 2008 is now out in beta and it's great to see the product hitting

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    PingBack from http://geeklectures.info/2008/01/11/why-we-decided-to-manage-vmware-and-what-that-means/

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Rakesh over at the Microsoft VM Management Blog answers the question, "Why would Microsoft's VMM manage VMware and what does that really mean?" Here, he walks you through some of the reasoning and thinking: 1) Customers - The primary reason that we decided

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi - this is Hector Linares, I am a Program Manager on the team that built System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I'm happy to report that we released the feature complete public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly known as vNext)

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Cheng posted a great post around managing VMWare with SCVMM Why should I use VMM to manage my VMware?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Technorati Tags: Microsoft , Windows , Management , Virtualization , Hyper-V Voglio riprendere un interessante

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Nedavno je objavljeno da ce se pomocu nove verzije System Center Virtual Machine Manager , koja ce biti

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    This is the 4th VMworld conference that I'm attending representing Microsoft. And it's the first time I've heard/seen the slighest acknowledgment from VMware that if virtualization isn't everywhere (which it's not) then management of the non-VM layer

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2008/01/11/why-we-decided-to-manage-vmware.aspx

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Det finns vissa saker som hänt under historiens gång som gjort att en hel massa människor

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Why should I use VMM to manage my VMware? In Rakesh's post , he talked pretty extensively on why we decided

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The Microsoft virtualization products that includes Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V , System Center Virtual

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Howdy - I'm Larry Grothaus, a product manager on the System Center team. To start out let me point out

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Have you tried installing and running Microsoft's Hyper-V yet? What about on a 16 Core AMD Opteron system? Well the folks over at HPC Systems have and they are sharing their thoughts and results with you. Check it out: After a successful install and test

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Does that include managing VM offering from other vendors, like the XEN platform, or more specifically the Citrx XenServer platform?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    This blog posting by Rakeshm explains the rationale behind the decision to include VMware management

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    På den stora management konferensen som Microsoft just nu kör i USA har man lanserat en så