CEP Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta started

Today another Community Evaluation Program started, this time for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. During this session the CEP was explaned bt Kenon Owens, the Technical Product Manager of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 beta. The next following months I will try to follow this CEP also and report the information back to you, but since the Configuration Manager CEP is my priority I might have to skip some sessions. Read the session summary!

Like said, the session kickoff, presented via Lync this time, was well attended by I think 30 persons and a team from Microsoft. The first CEP session, SCVMM 2012 Beta Overview presented by Kenon Owens.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is used to manage the Private Cloud Infrastructure and can be used for:

1. Deployment
   • Infrastructure enhancements (High Available VMM Server, Upgrade, Custom Properties, Powershell)
2. Fabric Management
   • Hyper-V bare metal provisioning
   • Hyper-V, VMWare and Citrix XenCerver management
   • Network Management
   • Storage Management
   • Update Management
   • Dynamic Optimization
   • Power Management
   • Monitoring Integration
3. Cloud Management
   • Application Owner Usage
   • Capacity and Capability
   • Delegation and Quota
4. Service Management
   • Service Templates
   • Application Deployment
   • Custom Command Execution
   • Image Based Servicing

Deployment

• SCVMM Upgrade support
  • Virtual Machine Manager supports upgrades from:
    • VMM 2008 R3 to VMM 2012 RC
    • VMM 2012 RC to VMM 2012 RTM
• VMM is High Available
  • VMM can be installed and configured as a High Available VMM Server, VMM server is now cluster aware
• Powershell support
  • VMM is fully powershell scriptable
  • Backward compatible with VMM 2008 R2 scripting interface

Fabric Management

• Physical Server
  • Manage multiple hypervisors – Hyper-V, VMWare, XenServer
  • Server hardware management – IPMI, DCMI, SMASH, Custom via provider
  • Hosting provisioning – from baremetal to Hyper-V to Cluster provisioning
• Network
  • Define logical networks using VLANs and Subnets per datacenter location
  • Address management for Static IPs, Load Balancer VIPs and MAC Addresses
  • Automating provisioning of load balancers via provider
• UPdate Management of Fabric Serrvers
  • Update operation control
  • updating a hyper-v cluser is fully automated
  • integrated with WSUS
• Dynamic Optimization
  • Cluster level workload balancing scheme to optimize for VM performance
  • Leverage live migration to move workloads
• Power Optimization
  • Leverages live migration to pack more VMs per host
  • Power down servers to optimize for power utilization
• Enhanced Placement
  • over 100 placements checks / validation
  • support for custom placement rules
  • multi-vm deployment for services

Private Clouds

• Private Cloud
  • abstraction that enables opaque usage model for service and VM managements
• Fabric
  • Compute: logical grouping of hosts or clusters in host groups
  • Storage: Storage classification, Pools, Providers and Arrays
  • Network: Logical Networks, IP/MAC address pools, load balancers, VIP templates
• Delegation – User Role
  • Quota: Defines per user limits on compute, memory, storage, number of VMs

Service Lifecycle Management

• Service Templates
  • used to model a multi-tier application
  • source of truth gor deployed service configuration
• Applications
  • Built-in support for web-deploy, server app-v, SQL DAC
  • Custom command execution for other application packages
• Image-based
  • OS seperated from apps
  • Composed during deployment
• Servicing
  • Change the template and then apply that change to deployed instances
  • Upgrade domains ensures application availability during servicing

Supported Operating Systems and Services

VMM Server:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 64bits (standard, enterprise, datacenter)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 64bits (standard, enterprise, datacenter)

HA VMM Server

• Windows Server 2008 R2 64bits (standard, enterprise, datacenter)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 64bits (standard, enterprise, datacenter)

Database Server

• SQL Server 2008 SP2
• SQL Server 2008 R2

VMM Console:

• Windows Server OS support as VMM server
• Windows 7 32 and 64 buts (professional, enterprise, ultimate)

Self service portal:

• IIS Server: Windows Server OS support same as VMM Server
• Browser: Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9

VMM Library Server:

• Windows Server OS support same as VMM Server + Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32 and 64 bit)
• No Windows Server 2003 Support

The following software is needed to be able to install VMM Server

• Windows Automated Installation Kit 2.0 (AIK) only
• .NET 3.5.1
• Powershell 2.0, WinRM 2.0
• SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 (local or remote)

Feature Requirements:

• Bare Metal Provisioning
  • Windows Deployment Services (Windows Server 2008 R2 only)
• Patching
  • WSUS 3.0 SP2 64bit
• PRO
  • Operations Manager 2007 R2+
• Citrix XenServer
  • XenServer Integration Suite for SCVMM
  • Needs to be installed on XenServers
• Storage Automation (SMI-S)
  • EMC, NetAPP (talks ongoing with other vendors)
• Load Balancer Integration
  • Custom provider (F5, Citrix, Brocade (RTM))
  • Needs to be installed on VMM server(s)
• Power Management/OSD (IPMI, SMASH, Custom Providers)
  • No action is needed for SMASH and IPMI supported hardware since these are built in
  • To use the custom iLO provider install it on the VMM server(s)

During the rest of the presentation the installation scenario’s and migration scenario’s were shown.

Next Session is June 9, 2011. The subject is “Adding Hyper-v host, deploying bare metal hyper-v hosts”. Interesting!

Comments