Hi, I’m Eric Winner, Principal Program Manager on the SCVMM team. Just last week at MMS 2011 we announced the public beta for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta . Today, I’m going to provide a high-level overview of the features and in the days to come we will continue to post subsequent blog postings offering detailed explanations of specific product areas.
Bookmark the SCVMM Blog, so you can come back again and again to learn more about VMM 2012 Beta!
VMM 2012 features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design and service modeling all of which can be used to efficiently offer an on-premises private cloud. This is not the SCVMM of yesterday. It is packed full of new and exciting features!
SCVMM 2012 offers key new features that include:
· Fabric Management
Hyper-v life cycle management (deploy to bare metal, configure, manage, patch)
Hyper-v Cluster Management (create cluster, configure, orchestrated patching of a hyper-v cluster)
Multiple Hypervisor Management (Hyper-v, VMware, Citrix XenServer)
Network Management
Storage Management
· Cloud Management
Private Cloud Management
· Self-service Usage
Self-service user experience enriched with ability to use the VMM console.
· Service Lifecycle Management
Author service templates
Deploy VMM authored services
Version and update authored service template
Apply new versioned service templates to deployed virtualized services using image-based servicing.
In general we expect customer to follow the below high-level scenario flow:
· Setup Virtual Machine Manager
· Create and configure the datacenter fabric
· Create and delegate clouds
· Author service templates, then deploy and update services running on the clouds.
Like I stated earlier, in the coming days the SCVMM team will publish a blog series that will focus on helping users get started with SCVMM 2012 beta. These blogs post simply highlight the features sets and provide useful tidbits from the feature area program manager’s on SCVMM team. For actual step-by-step guidance our top notch staff of technical writers have SCVMM 2012 Beta Documentation available on TechNet.
For now, I’ll leave you with a pictorial view of the areas for managing your fabric, clouds and services as well as our new drag-and-drop visual service designer. Stay tuned for more details in the days and weeks to come.
Datacenter Fabric- Server Management
Once you have VMM 2012 Beta installed lets take a walk through the SCVMM 2012 User Interface to help you understand the features within each workspace.
Below we start out in the Fabric workspace at the top node called Servers. Within the image below there is detail about the operations you perform in the Server Node within the Fabric Workspace.
Datacenter Fabric- Network Management
Next, while still in the fabric workspace we navigate down to the Networking Node. In the slide below there are details about the operations you perform in networking section within the fabric workspace.
Datacenter Fabric- Storage Management
Last but not least in the Fabric workspace is the Storage Section. The slide below provides you a screen shot of this space and details what operations are performed within the storage node in the Fabric workspace.
Private Cloud Creation
Now, we move over to the VMs and Services Workspace. Within this workspace depending upon your user role you will see virtualized workloads running on clouds or within host groups. In the image below see details about operations within private cloud node inside the VMs and Services work space.
Service Creation Designer
Once you have your SCVMM 2012 Fabric all setup to run virtualized workloads SCVMM provides you the ability to create virtualized services within the Service Designer tool. The below image details features within the Service Designer.
Resources and Feedback:
Use the SCVMM Community Forums to obtain general help, guidance, and assistance with the SCVMM 2012 Beta. You are welcome to submit suggestions or bugs via the feedback link on the SCVMM 2012 Beta Connect Site. When submitting bugs, please attach trace log details to help our team diagnose the issue. Information on collecting trace logs is provided in the SCVMM 2012 Troubleshooting Guide on SCVMM 2012 TechNet Library.
TechNet Library
· The SCVMM 2012 TechNet Library is the definitive content source for all step-by-step instructions.
We look forward to your feedback!
Eric Winner, Principal Lead Program Manager- SCVMM