At the launch of its Windows hypervisor Hyper-V, Microsoft announced the launch of its administration tools for virtual environments within 90 days of Hyper-V. Theoretically, the publisher should have delivered Virtual Machine Manager 2008, equivalent to Hyper-V Virtual Center for VMware ESX Center, before the end of September.

In a post published yesterday on their blog (link here), the System Center team seems to suggest that the arrival of VMM 2008 is slightly delayed because Diane Prescott, a product manager usually in charge of licensing, said that VMM 2008 will be available in the last quarter.

The blog appears to have surprised even Microsoft since, in France, most of the company’s partners are still preparing for a launch and since preparations for the tools’ new training programs are in full swing. When contacted by phone, Jennifer Koehler, product manager of the System Center for Microsoft France, has indicated to us that Microsoft has indeed decided to delay the launch of the software a week or two: “We had anticipated the end of September; it will be early in October, after the necessary validations and testing.”

But if Microsoft misses the window at the beginning of the quarter, it could use the conference Tech Ed Europe – IT Professionals, which takes place in Barcelona from November 3 to November 7, as a platform for the launch. In the meantime, users must continue to use the latest beta software as well as the patch to manage the final version of Hyper-V.

Two products instead of one

Other than the speculations concerning the launch date, the blog of the System Center team provides valuable information on how Microsoft intends to market the software. The publisher appears to have yielded to the demand of its users and offers VMM 2008 not only as part of the SMSE (System Center Management Suite Enterprise Server) as originally planned, but also as a standalone product.

Note that VMM2008 alone makes sense only in certain cases. To benefit from the performance optimization and resource management functions, or to use the snapshot or backup functions of virtual environments, you need other SMSE components (namely, Operations Manager and Data Protection Manager). Therefore, VMM 2008 alone will only be of interest to companies that already have tools for performance administration, metrology and backup for virtual machines and their servers.

Microsoft promises more information on the pricing of its administration solutions for virtual environments in August. The final prices of the products should be reported at their launch in October.

Thank you Christophe Bardy for providing the inspiration for this article.

As Hyper-V being the biggest fuzz in the Virtualization solutions today, thanks to the Microsoft marketing forces. They can generate the biggest noise about each product they produce. As a lot of people hearing the fuzz, but did not have the chance to discover Hyper-V, I have decided I will discover it and take every one with me in a Hyper-V Tour with explanation and snapshots. This discovery trip consist of 5 parts & Intro as below:

Intro: Introduction to Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V RTM & Our Discovery Trip.
Part one: Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V RTM Installation
Part Two: MS Hyper-V Virtual Networks Configuration & Hyper-V Server settings. <==
Part Three: MS Hyper-V Virtual Machine Creation.
Part Four: MS Hyper-V Virtual Machine Settings.
Part Five: Microsoft Hyper-V Snapshots Technology.

Bonus: Install SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 & Component Integration for Linux on Hyper-V

Part Two: MS Hyper-V Virtual Networks Configuration & Hyper-V Server settings:

As in the earlier part I have explained the Installation of Hyper-V RTM on Windows 2008 64-bit. In this part I will cover the configuraiton & Managment of Hyper-V RTM. I will discover most of Hyper-V Menus as well.

The first step after you have installed Hyper-V is to Add Hyper-V manager to your MMC. Hyper-V Manager is the Hyper-V Graphical managment interface. It can let you manage most of the Hyper-V features, but does not allow you to control the advanced features built upon Hyper-V like Quick Migration & High availability features which requires SCVMM (Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager). Although Hyper-V has already got to the RTM stage, SCVMM is still in beta. We will discover SCVMM at a later part of this series.

For now let’s forget SCVMM & focus on the Hyper-V Manager. The first step to manage your Hyper-V as mentioned earlier is to add Hyper-V manager to your MMC as showing in the snap shot below.

After Adding Hyper-V to your MMC, your Hyper-V Open UP and should look like the image below:

Choose the server you want to configure as shown in the image below

A good place to start your configuration from as I had figured out is the network configuration. As when you create your virtual machine it will prompt you to connect it to the desired network. So better than creating your virtual networks on the run when creating virtual machines and get it in the rush. Start with it and put the plan for your network configuration need at the beginning. Here is just a simple example of the network configuration:

As soon you click on the Virtual Network Manager in the Actions Panel it will open up and ask for the type of the virtual network you desire to have as in the image below:

As you can see in the image above there is three types of a virtual network that Hyper-V provide

External: Allow Virtual Machine to communicate with machines out side of the Physical server where Hyper-V has been installed as well other Virtual Machines inside the same host.

Internal: Allow Virtual Machines to communicate only with other Virtual Machines inside The same Physical Box where Hyper-V installed, but they will not be able to communicate with physical servers outside of that physical box or Virtual Machines on another Hyper-V Box.

Private: Isolated network where the virtual machine can’t communicate to any other Virtual or Physical Machines.

For the purpose of our testing we went with an external Virtual Network as we wanted to do remote desktops of the virtual machines. As we needed to communicate with our virtual machines from outside the box, we needed and external virtual network.

After choosing the network type as for our case “External Virtual Network” you will need to provide the name of your virtual network, the physical adapter to use for the virtual network, & the desired VLAN. The Wizard for that is showing in the below image:

After you have finished the virtual network configuration, you might want to look quickly on the Hyper-V Server settings. To start working with Hyper-V Server setting, hit the server setting from the action panel in the Hyper-V manager. The server setting wizard start as in the image below:

As shown in the image above the first two options is the Default Virtual Machines virtual hard disk & Configuration files paths. The rest of the options is to control your short cuts & How Hyper-V Act toward it.

Hyper-V Server configuration has ended, The next step is to create virtual machines and try it out. To see the virtual machine creation and configuration process look at next part of this article Part Three: MS Hyper-V Virtual Machine Creation.

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Few days ago, Microsoft announced at the Microsot Management Summit 2008 launch of the beta of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008), eagerly awaited in the market. This console management aims to make the shade of VMware VirtualCenter. According to Microsoft, the product is not only capable of handling both the VMs of Virtual Server 2005 R2 and hyper-v but also machines based on ESX.

Microsoft hopes to entice users (especially SMBs), especially those who chose VMware for a long time, to use its console to manage their VMs. The later would not need Virtual Center, or VMotion, one last point that still leaves dreamer, if we are to believe the numerous criticisms of QuickMotion, the equivalent VMotion at Microsoft, which is not the leader arrival.

Anyway, SVCMM integrates fine features, in addition to its early openness to heterogeneous environments, as the function and Resource Performance Optimization (PRO), which allows better management of the VMs according to customer needs.