Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing, RTM, of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and scheduled general availability via volume licensing for October 1. System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a unified, multi-vendor management solution for the virtualized datacenter that helps enable centralized administration of physical and virtual assets, increases server utilization, and provides dynamic resource optimization of virtual IT infrastructure.
The initial VMM 2008 release entered beta in the second quarter of 2008, roughly 8 months after the release of VMM 2007. The initial release of VMM 2008 introduced support for technologies like Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Now, a little over a year later, VMM 2008 R2 extends these capabilities to include:
- Live Migration — for moving virtual machines between hosts with no downtime
- Additional enhanced migration support for SAN migration in and out of clusters
- Multiple virtual machines per LUN using Clustered Share Volumes
- Hot add of virtual machine storage
- Functionality to migrate storage for running VMs
- iSCSI target and SAN-based migration across clusters
- Template-based rapid provisioning
- Maintenance mode to automate the evacuation of VMs off host machines,
- Live Migration host compatibility checks
A full list of changes can be found on the What’s New in VMM 2008 R2 page. If you would like to learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, Microsoft TechNet Technical Product Manager, Kenon Owens, will be hosting a session entitled ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’ on Wednesday, September 9, at 10:00am Pacific.