Specifications

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Reviewer’s Guide 5
use of physical resources. VMM also works with System Center Operations Manager so that
administrators can comprehensively manage both physical and virtual infrastructure.
Increases Operational Agility
In traditional data centers without virtualization, provisioning new machines is a lengthy process
measured in days, weeks, or even months, making it difficult for IT departments to keep pace with the
rate of business growth and change. Even with virtualization in place, IT administrators face a number
of challenges that can undermine operational efficiency and effectiveness. For example, IT
administrators need to provision and tear down virtual machines for test and development groups,
ensure that new virtual machines are built from the latest patch images, and prevent unnecessary
virtual machines from consuming resources.
VMM puts administrators firmly in control of their virtual infrastructure so they can reap the full benefits
of virtualization and respond rapidly to business needs. VMM gives administrators the tools they need
to rapidly provision virtual machines, delegate virtual machine provisioning to authorized users, and
centrally manage virtual assets.
 Reduces planned downtime – VMM support for Live Migration enables an administrator to move virtual
machines between Hyper-V hosts with no downtime. This enables routine maintenance to be performed
on Hyper-V hosts with no interruption of the computing resources for the end user.
 Enables dynamic IT resource optimization – Coupling VMM’s Performance Resource Optimization
(PRO) feature with Live Migration enables the administrator to create a dynamic IT infrastructure that can
automatically shift virtual machine workloads between Hyper-V servers based on system resource
utilization levels.
 Provides flexible storage management – An administrator can take advantage of VMM’s Quick Storage
Migration to optimize and consolidate the placement of virtual machine files on the SAN. Quick migration
allows the rapid movement of virtual machine files with minimal downtime. At the virtual machine level,
the ability to hot-add and remove storage enables the virtual machine to adapt quickly to changing
requirements.
 Speeds provisioning of new virtual machines – With VMM, an IT department can deliver new virtual
machines to business clients anywhere in the network infrastructure with a quick turnaround. VMM
supports agile operations with a central library of virtual building blocks that provide all assets needed to
build and update virtual machines. VMM templates enable the administrator to deploy approved virtual
machine configurations rapidly. Rapid provisioning combines high performance SAN cloning and VMM
templates to create new virtual machine guests very quickly.
 Reduces IT burdens by enabling user self-service – The VMM self-service Web portal allows
authorized users to provision virtual machines themselves, within policy limits set by administrators. This
means that the IT department retains full control of deployed resources without having to manually set up
and tear down environments for test and development teams. VMM improves the delegated-provisioning