This week I'm at the Connections conference in Las Vegas, and the buzz is all about the release of Exchange 2010 (congrats to the Exchange team on that going live this week) and SharePoint 2010 (coming soon). But still hanging on as the No. 1 subject is virtualization. The performance differences between Microsoft's Hyper-V and EMC VMware's ESX seem to be all that folks want to talk about in the "tastes great/less filling" world we live in. However, I believe people should focus on how Hyper-V works, using the Hyper-V manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), so here's the core of what I'll be telling the Connections attendees in my seminar tomorrow.
The key question about VMM is when should you use it. On one hand, I have administrators running four or five host servers with three or four guest machines each who use only the built-in Hyper-V Manager. They might better manage their environment with VMM, but they cannot justify its expense. So when should you begin thinking about using VMM for your environment?
[ Get more insight from InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese on Hyper-V. | Paul Venezia explains how to take full advantage of VMware's no-cost hypervisor. ]
First, let's be clear on what VMM 2008 R2 offers. It's a management tool focused on taking advantage of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization features, including:
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