System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is RTM

August 24th, 2009 | Tags:

Taken from the System Center Team Blog:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has RTM’d and GA via volume licensing is set for October 1. This is great news for all and I’d like to especially thank our VMM 2008 R2 Development, Product Management, and Test teams. Lots of hard work fueled by their passion in virtualization and management has resulted in a very good software release.

A 180-day evaluation version is now available, too, on the Microsoft Download site. You can access it here.

Please experience for yourself what the 10,000+ people who have previously downloaded our ‘Release Candidate’ plus organizations such as Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Technologies, and Indiana University have seen with VMM 2008 R2!

I encourage everyone to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4.

To learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, please try to attend our upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’. Presented by our Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens, it will be chocked full of new and cool VMM 2008 R2 items. Go here to register for this Wednesday, September 09, 2009 (10:00 AM Pacific) event.

Thanks!

Zane Adam

Senior Director, Virtualization and management

Overview

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) is a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized data center. It enables increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator, delegated administrator, and authorized end users.

VMM 2008 R2 can manage all the platforms managed by VMM 2008 and adds support for Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes significant feature improvements to Hyper-V. VMM 2008 R2 leverages these new platform enhancements and extends the feature set of VMM 2008.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Host Management

  • VMM 2008 R2 creates and manages virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts. When you add a host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 that does not have Hyper-V enabled, VMM 2008 R2 automatically enables the Hyper-V role on the host.
  • VMM 2008 R2 supports the following new features of Windows Server 2008 R2:
    • Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
    • Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
    • Network adapters that support the VMQ feature are able to create a unique network queue for each virtual network adapter and then connect that queue directly to the virtual machine’s memory. This connection routes packets directly from the hypervisor to the virtual machine, bypassing much of the processing in the virtualization stack.
    • Network adapters that support the TCP Chimney feature are able to offload the processing of network traffic from the networking stack. Both of these features increase network performance and reduce CPU utilization.
    • Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running.

Feature Bullet Summary:

  • Live migration
  • Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) support that enables multiple Highly Available Virtual Machines (HAVM) per LUN.
  • Hot add of storage
  • Support for VMware vSphere 4 (VMware VI3 feature parity only)
  • SAN Migration into and out of clustered hosts
  • Processor flexibility
  • Network optimization
  • Quick storage migration
  • Maintenance mode for hosts
  • Support for third party cluster file system, Sanbolic Melio FS
  • Support for third party storage class resource, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows
  • Expanded support for iSCSI SANs
  • Support for VMware port groups for virtual switches
  • Support for Virtual Machine permissions assigned in Hyper-V
  • Dynamic policy based load balancing

Source: here

  1. Terry
    October 19th, 2009 at 17:23
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Question…nice write-up. From MS site, is non-R2 Hyper-V host NOT supported? http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/system-requirements-R2.aspx#hosts It looks as if all other hosts have to be upgraded to R2 for management. Is that true?

  2. Adam
    October 20th, 2009 at 15:16
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Terry, from personal experience Hyper-V R2 hosts are supported, however such enhanced functionality as live miration will not work with an R1 host.