Microsoft's vision of virtualization -- Part 3

So far I've covered the server and desktop aspects of virtualization from the Microsoft event I attended earlier this week. This post focuses on the management arena, the space where I think that Microsoft actually has accomplished the most.

So once you get your whole environment virtualized, there is a lot to do on the maintenance side of the house. In addition to monitoring all the guest servers, you now also need to monitor the hosts to ensure that the hardware remains functional and that none of the guests are stepping on each others' toes. Some of this can be automated through features like DRS from VMware, but some of it requires a bit more visibility into the servers. After all, moving a guest server that is hogging resources to a less loaded host doesn't address the fact that the guest is still hogging resources. Microsoft is touting their Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and SCCM products as a means to manage a heterogeneous virtualized environment, and it seems to be a pretty decent approach.

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) is about to be released (the 2007 version is available now) and will address many issues of management in a heterogeneous environment. It will allow for the management of VMware, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V environments, all from a single console. And they are working on integration for Citrix/Xen, too. The tool is based on open APIs and PowerShell, two of my favorite things, so it will allow you to do things like script the Vmotion move of a guest from one host to another, from the same console that you can manager your dev environment that is running on Hyper-V. I know that VMware has some scripting, too, but having a single interface for everything is nice, especially when an environment is big enough that a single vendor isn't really an option.

Building on top of the System Center line of products, Microsoft also has their Data Protection Manager that integrates into the Hyper-V code, allowing for VSS-aware snapshots of guests from the host system. I wrote about that in the first part of this series and I'm not going to get into the details again, but it is pretty cool and part of the management so it is worth mentioning.

And still in the System Center realm, there is the SCCM/MOM integration for the guest OS sessions. The big feature that Microsoft is pushing here is the availability of their Performance Resource Optimization ("PRO") Tips in the guests as well as on the host. The idea behind the PRO tips is that they are application aware and can provide troubleshooting best practices - either as a suggestion or an automated action - based on the agent seeing various activity in the applications, not just at the OS level. So when it sees 75% CPU utilization on a guest session the MOM agent might be able to see that it is the SQL Server process that is causing the usage spike, and tell you why the SQL process is doing that. This isn't really new - it is part of MOM, but it does integrate into the whole SCCM and VMM environment, so the unified interface there is nice.

Microsoft has also moved management out of IIS and into an MMC. It seems that they're finally realizing that not everyone wants to run everything from a web browser, nor do we all want to have dozens of web servers everywhere that we have to keep track of and monitor.

The advances in VMM are definitely worth keeping an eye out for; I think that they will be more significant than the Hyper-V release from a management perspective.