If you’ve been using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 for any period of time in an enterprise environment, it is safe to say, you have probably experienced the lack of management tools. In an effort to play catch up with VMware’s management solutions, Microsoft has recently announced two products to hopefully fill that void.

The first product, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Management Pack, is a management solution that works with Microsoft Operations Manager or MOM. It enables you to monitor the physical server host (running either Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2) as well as the host server’s virtual machines. The management pack provides monitoring and reporting for the following scenarios:

Virtual Server
Monitors Virtual Server service availability
Detects configuration errors
Detects critical error conditions
Provides a graphical mapping of virtual machines to their virtual machine hosts

Virtual Machines
Monitors virtual machine health state
Detects start and restoration failures
Detects save failures
Detects critical error conditions
Monitors processor, memory, and disk utilization

Reporting
Identifies good candidates for conversion to virtual machines
Views performance history of a computer over a specified period of time
Views a summary of host servers and virtual machines
Views CPU, memory, and disk utilization for a virtual machine

The second product announced was Microsoft’s Virtual Server Manager, codenamed Carmine, which is expected to enable administrators to add, move, and manage virtual machines on its virtualization platform. Hopefully, one of its key features will help with the huge problem of patch management, allowing the administrator to move the virtual machines from one host to another while the host server is patched and rebooted before moving the virtual machines back. While the product is expected to have some of the basic features of VMware’s VirtualCenter product, it certainly will not be as sophisticated, as VMware’s product has been in the hands of its users for two and half years now.

But is it going to be enough? VMware is still on target to release its next generation platform, VMware ESX Server 3.0 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.0 by the end of this quarter. Adding on the new Distributed Resource Manager (DRM) and Distributed Availability Service (DAS) features to their product, along with other new management and feature functionality, seems to keep them a few steps ahead in the race yet again. VMware is determined to hold that number one spot it earned so many years ago.

Posted by David Marshall on April 25, 2006 04:59 AM