Microsoft has taken a small step forward to improving the ability
of IT administrators to manage virtual machines with the initial
beta release of its own VM management software.
The System Centre Virtual Machine Manager, which was introduced
at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 in April, is available for
download to registered public beta 1 users, the company said. This
trial is for test/lab environment deployments only and is available
at Microsoft
downloads.
When completed sometime in late 2007, the software will have
virtual machine provisioning features that let administrators
create and install new virtual machine features with an operating
system and application fully installed in the desired
configuration. The software, which is a standalone server
application, also lets managers put virtual machines on the
physical server with the best combination of resources and
performance for a particular application.
Experts have observed that the ability to configure and manage
virtual machines dynamically is still hard to do, and technologies
on the market today still handle the problem in a manual fashion.
"What we are seeing is still the first generation from all
parties," said Jon Collins, a principal analyst at consulting firm
Macehiter Ward-Dutton.
"We are trying to build a distributed operating system that runs
across machines in the same way today as if I ran an application
and it needed more memory," Collins said.
In May, virtualisation market leader VMware released its
Infrastructure 3 package, which added new levels of automation,
resource management and capacity planning for servers and
storage.
Pricing and licensing for Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager
has not yet been disclosed. The software will support Virtual
Server 2005 R2 and virtualisation supported by the upcoming version
of Windows Server code-named Longhorn.
This article originally appeared on
SearchServerVirtualization.com.