Introduction
In today’s business climate, IT environments are becoming more complex, and the people who manage them are often asked to lower costs and improve operational efficiency. With greater demand on IT to solve business challenges, data centers quickly fill to capacity, and each new server purchase increases capital and operating expenditures as well as power and cooling costs. At the same time, servers are underutilized; on average, only 5 percent of a typical server’s capacity is actually used. Provisioning new machines is a lengthy process measured in days and months, making it difficult for IT to keep pace with the rate of business growth and change. In addition, managing servers can be labor-intensive, and the need to provision and tear-down test and development environments can consume valuable resources and time. Virtual machine technology has great potential to change the cost of IT. Many IT organizations view virtualization as the disruptive yet promising technology that will help them get more from their servers and create a more adaptable and agile data center.
Virtualization at a Glance
Traditionally, applications are closely associated with the physical servers they run on. Virtual machine technology creates an abstraction layer between the physical hardware and software, so that IT administrators can run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server. This approach offers a host of benefits:
- Increased asset utilization – Servers running virtual machines can operate at 60 percent utilization or greater, depending on the availability requirements of their workloads.
- Lower power, space, and cooling costs – Data center operations are more efficient with more applications on fewer physical machines.
- Faster response to business needs – Instead of having to manually set up a new physical machine, IT administrators can easily provision new virtual machines for development teams and business units.
Virtualization Issues
Although virtual machine technology offers compelling benefits, it also presents challenges unique to a virtual data center. Before engaging in a virtualization project and while evaluating virtualization technologies, IT organizations need to carefully consider the following issues, among others:
- How to integrate virtual machine management into other data center management solutions.
- How to make use of current investments in Microsoft® Windows Server technologies.
- How to ensure efficient, unified management of both virtual and physical data center assets.
- How to reduce the risk of operating in a new virtual environment.
Microsoft System Center
For IT professionals responsible for managing their virtual infrastructure, Microsoft® System Center—the Microsoft family of system management products—is a comprehensive solution optimized for the management of Microsoft Windows Server operating systems running in the virtualized data center.
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) - Delivers simple and complete support for consolidating multiple physical servers within a virtual infrastructure, thereby helping to increase overall utilization of physical servers. Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) also enables administrators and authorized users to rapidly provision virtual machines.
- System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 - Provides continuous data protection on physical and virtual machines for backup and business continuity.
- System Center Operations Manager 2007 - Provides a sophisticated solution for unified health monitoring of physical and virtual machines
System Center Configuration Manager provides a comprehensive solution for change and configuration management.
Together, the System Center family of products provides the best solution for using existing IT administrative skills with physical servers. This white paper provides a general overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and explains how VMM addresses the key issues related to consolidating assets and managing a virtualized environment.
Virtual Machine Manager Architecture
VMM is an enterprise-ready management solution for virtual data centers that uses an organization’s existing expertise and investments in Microsoft Windows Server® technology.
Virtual Machine Manager Server
The Virtual Machine Manager Server is the core process that communicates with the virtual machine hosts and maintains the system information in a Microsoft SQL Server ™ 2005 database. The VMM Server runs on either the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008. The VMM Server can scale to manage hundreds of Virtual Machine Hosts running thousands of virtual machines, all concurrently. The SQL Server database can be hosted on all versions of SQL Server 2005 from Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition for larger deployments. The VMM Server can be accessed through the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Administrator Console, Windows PowerShell™ command line, or through the Delegated Management and Provisioning portal. A connector provides a near real-time connectivity with System Center Operations Manager 2007 if it is present, enabling the integrated management of both physical and virtual hosts.