Virtualization is a great buzzword at the moment and has been for a whie now. Whilst many of us know what it is and even how it might be able to help us out in terms of consolidation, cost vs capacity, IT support and of course the age old justification process for when we are buying new kit on which to run these systems. Many people still don’t know a great deal about some of the great tools available for helping us out with the installation and implementation process.

For a while now we have been using a product called System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (Microsoft). We started out using the initial 2007 base product and are currently using the latest SCVMM 2008 R2 release. I have lead most of our virtualization projects here at PhillipsTaylorBrown and have looked at most of the tools available and tried most of them at some point or another (Sometimes with a great deal of frustration!).After using some of the more readily available tools I think its safe to say that with SCVMM 2008 R2.. Microsoft absolutley nailed it, for an off the shelf product they have really done a great job with this one!

Let me tell you why:

one size fits all! – well, its about as close to that as you expect from software. SCVMM works with HYPER-V on windows Server, Windows Server HYPER-V (remember these are 2 different offerings, albeit with the same hypervisor), VMware ESX, ESXi, all the way to vSphere 4 (although not officially supported it seems fine), Microsoft Virtual Server (MSVS). Soon we will have support for Citrix/Xen too! All the major platforms catered for so only one managment and impementation solution required.

Its fast. There are a few tools out there that will work very well in certain situations and are, if we are being honest pretty good and great value for money, but the price you pay is performance. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you have to virtualize a server (or several) holding a lot of data. Then that ‘simple P2V’operation takes hours and hours. What if its mission critical? What if it goes wrong and you have to start over? – SCVMM gets around this by using the volume shadow copy service and as such runs that bit quicker but with the added advantage of not interrupting the source server, making the operation pretty slick with very little (minutes) of downtime.

Not to be confused with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (which is the addon/additional role