SCVMM 2008 R2 review

As I was announcing last week, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has been released. A SCVMM 2008 R2 evaluation version is available here.

Building on the new and (much) improved Hyper-V that comes with Windows Server 2008 R2, SCVMM 2008 R2 also comes with a few significant feature improvements, such as:

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 and with a barely noticeable impact on application performance. 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.
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. Microsoft also added storage enhancements to SCVMM to accommodate changes in the way that VMs can now use CSV (clustered shared volumes) and for provisioning changes to speed up VM deployments.
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.

Also, it’s worth noting that since the first version of SCVMM 2008 was launched, VMware released the current virtualization platform, vSphere 4. Testing brings another great piece of news about SCVMM 2008 R2, in that it is able to work just fine with vSphere 4, although Microsoft officially supports only VMware Infrastructure 3 environments at this time.

All in all, I find SCVMM 2008 R2 to be one of the best Virtualization Platform Managers out there, especially due to it’s ability to manage multiple virtualization environments (Hyper-V, MSVS and VMWare for now, with Citrix/Xen support announced to be implemented later as well), and – of course – due to it’s other particularly useful features.