I love when Microsoft takes an already good product and adds a whole lot of new features to make the next version not just better but excellent. This is what’s happening with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) in its new version: 2012, currently in beta, to be released in the second half of 2011.

The Office Ribbon interface makes its mark in SCVMM 20212

In this article series we’ll take a look at what’s new, what’s improved and introduce the new concepts and capabilities of SCVMM 2012.

Part 1 What’s New, Installation Part 2 Private Cloud, Library Services, Security and Accounts Part 3 Logical networks, Storage Integration Part 4 Bare Metal Configuration, Dynamic & Power Optimization Part 5 Integrating with VMWare, Integrating with Citrix XenServer, Cluster patching Part 6 Self Service empowerment, Service Deployment and Conclusion

What’s new in SCVMM 2012 – Not just VMs anymore

The biggest shift in SCVMM is the change from managing Virtual Machines (VMs) to managing the entire virtualized datacentre. The shift is so dramatic that “System Center Data Centre Manager” might be a more appropriate name. SCVMM can communicate with brand new machines with no OS installed and do a bare metal installation, then configure them in a Hyper-V cluster as well as talk directly to your SAN storage. This then becomes a private cloud inside of SCVMM that abstracts hosts, storage, and networking into a unified pool of computing resources.

Add to this the ability to use Server App-V to deploy applications through SCVMM as well as SQL Server profiles to deploy customised database servers and Dynamic- and Power Optimization. The latter allows SCVMM to turn off host machines when they’re not needed and then turn them back on when the load increases whereas the former allows SCVMM to automatically move VMs between hosts to balance the load. The concept of multiple virtual machines working together (web front end servers, backend database servers) is covered by a services concept where multiple machines can be provisioned in unison; if the load increases scale out with additional VMs can be executed. Network load balancer appliances are also recognised and supported directly in SCVMM.

Patching a host cluster is a difficult task as each node has to have its VMs migrated to other hosts, the system patched and rebooted before the process is repeated on the next host. SCVMM now orchestrates cluster host patching as well as integrating with Windows Server Update Services and allowing you to define baselines of patches that each host needs.

The list of managed hypervisors has grown, not only does SCVMM manage Hyper-V and VMware, it now manages Citrix Xen server as well, covering all the major hypervisors on the market.

Due to all the critical functionality of SCVMM it’s recommended to implement a highly available system if your environment is large. This means that you need a smaller cluster, separate from your production resources that will house instances of SCVMM. This cluster needs to be on Windows Server 2008 R2 and it needs to be setup before SCVMM is installed. It’s also good practise to setup a highly available SQL Server database on separate hardware as well as storing the library on highly available file servers. In this configuration the encryption keys that SCVMM use to protect data transfers need to be stored in AD (so they’re available to all SCVMM nodes) and you have to use domain accounts to run the different services.

Installation of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

When planning a System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 deployment consider the different roles. In a small environment these can all be located on the same server but as the datacentre grows it’s beneficial to split the roles across multiple hosts. The management server is the heart of SCVMM, whereas the library server stores templates, VHDs, scripts etc. The console can run on the management server as well as be installed on workstations for remote management, the self-service portal allows designated users to create and manage their own VMs and finally the database resides on an SQL Server machine.

Software that needs to be installed on the server is the usual suspects: WinRM 2.0, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, PowerShell 2.0 (for the console), IIS (for the self-service portal) and Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7. Supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008 SP2+ (x64 only) / 2008 R2 and the backend database needs to be either SQL Server 2008 SP2+ or 2008 R2. This means that SQL Server Express is no longer supported for the database server; it has to be a full version (Standard or Enterprise).

Supported virtual machine hosts are the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2, full installation or server core as well as the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is no longer supported. VMware’s virtualization platform is supported as it was in earlier versions through vCenter Server, now requiring version 4.1 with hosts running ESXi / ESX 4.1 and 3.5; ESX 3.0 is no longer supported. Citrix XenServer is supported with version 5.6 with Feature Pack 1; there’s an Integration Suite supplemental pack for SCVMM. The XenServer support will be useful when you want to run Linux guests as the choice is wider than what’s supported in Hyper-V.

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Let’s start with the new key features:

Hyper-V support: VMM 2007 only supported Virtual Server. Of course you still can manage Virtual Server 2005 R2 with VMM 2007.

VMware ESX support: Actually, you can manage VMware Infrastructure 3 with VMM 2008. There is no doubt about it: This is the best way to convince VMware customers to move slowly to Hyper-V.

Physical Resource Optimization (PRO): As far as I understand this feature, it just integrates VMM 2008 with Operations Manager 2007. If a “PRO-enabled” server experiences problems (hardware or software), VMM can move a virtual machine automatically to another host or alert an administrator. The manufacturer of the server has to support PRO. It seems as if this has nothing to do with performance issues. Correct me if I am wrong. I think the name of the feature is a bit misleading.

There are also quite a few other (minor) improvements. Please check out this Microsoft paper (Why is this in PDF?) and rakeshm’s VM Management Blog for more information.

Of course, the most important new feature is the Hyper-V support. Even though Hyper-V Manager is a nice tool, the real management tool for Hyper-V is VMM 2008. There has been extensive discussion about the threat that Hyper-V poses for VMware. However, in my view Microsoft’s main virtualization product is not Hyper-V, but Virtual Machine Manager. I think the hypervisor is a relatively unimportant factor in the battle between VMware and Microsoft. The money is earned with the management tools. The compressed installation files of VMM 2008 have about 3GB. This shows how complex VMM is.

By the way, VMM 2008 costs $1,304 and it will be available in November. Considering that System Center suite only costs $1,497, it doesn’t make much sense to buy VMM alone. The System Center Suite includes Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007. I think this demonstrates Microsoft’s advantage over VMware. They can integrate and bundle their virtualization products with their other management tools. Even though VMware is still far ahead when it comes to virtualization technology, it will be hard to compete with this armada of sophisticated management solutions.

I wanted to update my VMM 2008 Beta test installation today, but it failed. Actually, VMM 2008 setup crashed when I tried. Thus I had no other choice than to uninstall the beta. Afterwards VMM 2008 was complaining that the existing VMM SQL Server database is incompatible with VMM 2008 RTM. I had to create a new database, which meant that I lost all my previous settings. I just had a couple of virtual machines in my test installation; hence this wasn’t a big deal.

I had a similar problem when I wanted to add my Hyper-V host to VMM 2008. The agent of the beta is incompatible with the RTM version, and VMM 2008 was unable to update it. I had to manually uninstall the old agent and then install the new one afterwards. It seems as if Microsoft has made quite a few changes since the last beta.

Here are some resources you might find useful:

VMM 2008 Homepage

VMM 2008 Features

VMM 2008 Download

VMM 2008 Release Notes

VMM 2008 Online Demo

VMM 2008 White paper

Windows Virtualization Team blog

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He claims that the main reason why they decided to support VMware is that customers were asking for this feature. Well, I think that customers are asking for many different features. I believe that the primary reason is a different one. VMware is the market leader in this field. Hence, if Microsoft wants to gain a bigger market share in the virtualization market they have to convince VMware customers (not MS customers) to move to Microsoft’s virtualization products. The best way to do this is to make this transition as smooth as possible. So you start with using VMM and when Hyper-V becomes competitive with VMware’s hypervisor, you can switch more easily.

More interesting in this post is the way Microsoft plans to support VMware:

Finally, I want to emphasize that when we say “manage VMware”, we mean that day to day, you’ll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we’ll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you’ll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS.

This sounds promising. I only hope that Microsoft will keep this promise. It might be too enticing to just neglect new VMware Infrastructure features to make customers believe that Microsoft has the better overall virtualization solution. Note that this is a new situation for Microsoft.

Usually, third party vendors offer tools to manage Microsoft products. This is in the interest of Microsoft because it extends the capabilities of their own products. With VMM, Microsoft plans exactly the opposite. They support a direct competitor by adding features to their major product. I somehow doubt that this is still an option after Microsoft becomes the market leader in the virtualization market.

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• New version: VMRCPlus 1.6 – a free GUI tool to manage Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (1)
• Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) bugs (1)

The first thing I tried after I installed the tool is the snapshot feature. With VMRCPlus 1.5, I was able to create snapshots, but the recovery option was always grayed out. So I was pleased to see that after updating to version 1.6, I was allowed to recover a virtual machine. However, this feature still doesn’t work for me. All I got is this error message: Unhandled exception has occurred in your application (see screenshot). After that, the virtual machine was not even displayed anymore in VMRCplus. I had to add the virtual machine to make it visible again.

This snapshot feature was the only thing that didn’t work during my brief test. So I think VMRCPlus 1.6 is a good enough replacement for Virtual Server’s user interface. It is interesting to note that VMRCPlus can create snapshots while the guest system is online. Not even System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsoft’s more sophisticated management tool for Virtual Server, can do that. Well, at least, the snapshot feature (checkpoints), works there (most of the time).

What I like about VMRC 1.6 is that you can manage multiple Virtual Server hosts with one central interface. It is not so convenient as with VMM, though. All in all, it seems to me that Microsoft has to work a little harder to make its user interfaces for Virtual Server a bit more reliable.

Aaron Tiensivu summarized the new features:

1. To reflect the terminology used in the web administration UI of Virtual Server, the terminology of VMRCplus has been updated.
2. VMRCplus now offers configuration of scripts on both the Virtual Server and Virtual Machine level. This was missing from the previous release.
3. VMRCplus offers configuring promiscuous mode on the network so you can trace traffic in the virtual switch. This is something Virtual Server does not offer in the web administration UI.
4. Minor enhancements like storage of Console Manager coordinates, conflict handling when a shortcut already exists (something Virtual Server fails to resolve).
5. The COM and LPT port assignment logic has been fixed (most of it did not work).
6. The x86 installer package no longer installs on x64. This has been done to prevent issues with 32-bit VMRCplus on 64-bit Virtual Server.
7. Error handling has been enhanced and several issues have been fixed.

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In my first test, I realized that the VMM admin console was quite unstable. I assumed that those problems were related to the virtual environment where I tested VMM. For my second review, I just explored VMM’s features on a physical installation. I didn’t encounter any serious problems then. But the longer I work with VMM, the more troubles seem to arise. I am obviously not the only one struggling with VMM these days. Microsoft’s Technet forum is full of unanswered questions and bug reports.

Of course it is possible that my problems were caused by my own errors or that they were somehow related to some special conditions in my test environment. However, I installed VMM on a freshly installed Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 system. I tested it with two new installed Virtual Server hosts. The whole installation and configuration of VMM is fairly simple. There is not much room for mistakes. And if an application crashes on a newly installed server, usually a bug is the culprit.

So here are the problems I encountered in my tests so far:

VMM Admin Console

I already mentioned it before. Virtual Machine Manager’s Admin Console is quite unstable. It completely crashed a couple of times. In some cases, I was able to reproduce the failure. When I tried to modify the hardware of a certain virtual machine the Admin Console would always shut down, improperly. This was independent from the location where I run the Admin Console. It crashed on the VMM server (Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2) and also on a Vista machine.

VMM service crashed

This happened only once. After one of the crashes of the VMM Admin Console I wasn’t able to reconnect to the VMM Server because its service was shut down, too. I had to restart it. The event log only contained a cryptic “Net Runtime 2.0 Error”. I didn’t try to find the cause of the problem since VMM seemed to work fine again afterwards.

Cloning Process

All in all, I cloned about 10 times. More than half of them failed in the first place. I cloned from host to host, and on the same host. Usually the cloning process would just be interrupted after a while. However, in all cases I was able to resume cloning using VMM’s repair feature. The error message always indicated that the connection to the Virtual Server host was broken. That was never the case, though. I always checked the connection immediately after the cloning process failed. I also ran some tests to make sure that there is no network problem.

Changing hardware configuration

This problem might be related to the cloning issue described above because it only happened with cloned virtual machines. Sometimes I wasn’t able to change the hardware configuration of a virtual machine. In those cases VMM always complained that the virtual machine has to be stopped first or that it is in safe mode. This was never the case, though. I wasn’t even able to mount an ISO image in those VMs using VMM. However, it always worked fine when I configured these problematic VMs with Virtual Server’s own admin interface. I concluded that it must be a VMM bug.

Access denied to virtual machine

After I updated one of these cloned VMs using the Virtual Server Admin Console, I was no more able to manage it with VMM. VMM would always complain with this message: Detailed Error (2910). (Access is denied (0×80070005)). So VMM didn’t have “appropriate permissions” to access this VM, anymore. However, all other VMs on this host were still manageable. The problematic VM also seemed to work fine. I didn’t encounter any problems when I managed this virtual machine using the Virtual Server admin interface. In the end I was able to configure it by using VMM’s repair feature again. It seems that this the most important feature.

Merging of checkpoints on a Linux guest system

Checkpoints are what VMware calls snapshots. They allow you to restore a virtual machine to a prior state. It is possible to merge several checkpoints to free hard disk space. When we tried this feature on a Linux guest system (SuSE Linux 10.0 Enterprise) a folder with all its contents was gone after the machine rebooted. The strange thing is that no checkpoint was created before or after this folder was added to the guest system. Only this one folder was deleted, everything that was added after this folder was created was still there. I suspect that VMM had problems with the large size of this folder (about 100 GB). Since then, I only use this checkpoint feature very cautiously.

There also were a couple of minor issues. The function didn’t work at first, but when I tried it again later, VMM recognized its mistake and allowed me to proceed. For example, I once wanted to shut down a virtual machine from the VMM Admin Console. VMM complained that this feature is only available if the Virtual Machine Additions are installed. After I reassured myself that they were running on the guest, VMM admitted its wrong assessment of the situation and let me shut down the VM.

There were other similar cases. I won’t list them all here. I think you got the picture by now. In my test VMM was quite unreliable. However in most cases I was able to get what I wanted in the end. I still like VMM because its user interface certainly is a major improvement to the old fashioned Web-based user interface of Virtual Server 2005. And of course VMM’s most interesting feature is its ability to manage multiple Virtual Server hosts with just one user interface. So at the moment I am undecided if we will work with Virtual Machine Manager in a productive environment.

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I first tried VMM under VMware Workstation, which probably doesn’t make much sense. This might have been just a bit too much virtualization. This time I installed Virtual Machine Manager on a physical machine running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2. My test system just met the minimum requirements for VMM (Pentium with 2.8 GHz and 2GB RAM). Usually, one has to double Microsoft’s recommendations. However, I didn’t encounter performance problems. My test environment was quite simple, though. I just worked with two Virtual Server hosts, and 10 virtual machines.

When I played with the VMM under VMware Workstation, the Admin Console crashed several times. This didn’t happen in my new test environment. I installed the VMM Admin Console on my Vista desktop. The installation is easy and fast. The only information I had to enter was the name of the VMM server.

To use VMM, you don’t need a manual. Everything is absolutely self-explanatory if you have worked with virtualization software before. I only had problems with cloning virtual machines. It seems to be a bit unreliable. It failed twice after reaching 90% of the cloning progress. Virtual Machine Manager doesn’t allow you to clone while VMs are running. So basically it just has to copy the VHD files. I wonder what can go wrong here. The error message wasn’t helpful since it claimed that the connection to the host was lost which was not the case.

But in both cases I was able to get the new virtual machines working by using VMM’s “Repair Virtual Machine” feature. What I like about cloning is that you can use it to copy a VM from host to host. I tried this with Windows Server 2003 and Linux as guest OS. It is also possible to move VMs. This feature is called migration. Unfortunately, VMM doesn’t support live migration, that is, you can only move a VM if it is down.

You can also store VMs in the VMM library. This is useful if you don’t have enough space on your hosts and have to move offline VMs somewhere else, for example. So you can just park the VM on your VMM server in its library. Of course, you can’t run it there.

Very useful is VMM’s checkpoint feature. VMware calls them snapshots. Creating checkpoints allows you to restore a VM to a previous state. You can create multiple checkpoints of a VM. Unfortunately, this is also only possible when the VM is down. VMM shuts down the VM automatically, and restarts it after the checkpoint was created. In my test, this was done within a minute or so. The same applies when you restore a checkpoint. You can merge checkpoints if you need space on the host and if you are sure that you no longer need them. But VMM will also shut the virtual machine down then.

Microsoft really has to work on Virtual Server’s and Virtual Machine Manager’s live features. This is one of the major shortcomings compared with VMware products. Since this feature was also cut for Windows Server Virtualization (WSV), there is no hope that we will see an improvement in this direction in the near future. However, one also has to consider that with $499 for the Workgroup Edition, VMM is really cheap. You can only work with five hosts, though. If you have more Virtual Server hosts, you’ll need the Enterprise Edition which costs $860 per physical host (together with Operations Manager and DPM 2007).

VMM also supports physical to virtual migration (P2V). It is interesting to note that it is possible to migrate a physical server while it is online. However, you can also do this when the server is down by using the WAIK. The latter option is probably more reliable. I want to have a closer look at this feature, and I will report about it in another post.

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The hardware requirements are quite huge:

• Processor: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
• RAM: 2 GB
• Hard disk (if using the default local SQL Server 2005 Express database instance): 7 GB
• Hard disk (if using a remote SQL Server database instance): 1 GB
• Hard disk (if using the VMM server as a library server): 80 GB

Notice that these are the hardware requirements from the SCVMM help file. Usually, one has to double Microsoft’s recommendations.

These are the software requirements:

• Windows Server 2003 SP1 or above (for VMM Server)
• .Net 2.0
• .Net 3.0
• SQL Server 2005 SP1 or SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (for VMM Server)
• WinRM (aka WS-Management v1.1)
• Windows PowerShell 1.0 (for VMM Administration Console)

If you want to test VMM under Windows Server 2003 R2 and enabled WinRM, then you have to disable it first and get it from the link above. I wonder why Microsoft didn’t include WinRM and PowerShell in the setup file like the other components.

There are three separate components to install: the Virtual Machine Manager Server, the VMM Administrator Console and the VMM Self-Service Portal. The Self-Service Portal is an optional Web-based management tool. Virtual Machine Server and Administrator Console can be installed on the same system. The Administrator Console also works under Windows XP and Windows Vista.

It is also required that the VMM server belongs to a Windows domain and you have to install WinRM on the machine where Virtual Server is running. This system has to be a Windows domain member, too. At least, I didn’t figure out how to connect to a standalone Virtual Server from SCVMM.

The Virtual Machine Manager Administration Console made a good impression to me. It is a bit like the one from ISA Server. You can use it to do many things where you would otherwise have to work with the ugly Web-based interface of Virtual Server. For example, you can start virtual machines, access them thru VMRC, save the state, clone VMs, and so on. Even though VMRCplus was already step in the right direction, the VMM Administration Console gets to be the first user interface for Virtual Server that earns this name.

Unfortunately, the Admin Console was quite unstable during my short test. It crashed a couple of times. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I tested it in a virtual environment under VMware Workstation 6. It could be that this was just a little too much virtualization. However, my virtual test server had enough resources available.

Since we are about to run some tests with Virtual Server anyway, I probably will have a closer look at SCVMM soon, assuming that I manage to get it running more reliably.

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 review – Part 1: What is new and installation (0)
• FREE: VHD tool – Create, convert, and extend a VHD quickly (0)
• FREE: Vmdk2Vhd – Convert VMware VMDK to Hyper-V VHD (2)
• FREE: VHD Resizer – Shrink or Expand a Hyper-V VHD (12)
• VMM 2008 RTM – new features – prices – update of the beta version (0)

You should have a fast Internet connection if you want to download the five rar files because they add up to 3 GB. Virtualization.info lists SCVMM’s most interesting features. The tight integration with Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, and Data Protection Manager sounds quite interesting.

I was surprised that the next version, SCVMM R2, will also support VMware and Xen. According to Sirrat, it should be available once Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) is released.

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