SCVMM 2012 - closing the gap to vCenter (or squaring up to vCloud Director)?

I’m currently “beta testing” both vSphere 5 and SCVMM 2012, so I was actually looking forward to today’s “best of” Microsoft Management Summit 2011 down in London, basically a short version of the recent Vegas event…

I mainly wanted to see whether the excitement I’ve sensed recently dealing with Microsoft is reflected at the event and whether there were any updates on the release date/schedule…

So “release is targeted for the end of the year” – were the words when talking about SCVMM … so no real change here.

It’s still not clear how/when the entire “System Center” suite will come together as the various components were in different code stages, e.g. with SCVMM being public beta and the SCOM code demoed today being described as “still not dry” PRE-beta.

The show kicked off with the by now familiar messaging around public/private cloud and the (not so) wonderful term “consumerization” of IT… . Key message was Microsoft’s ability to apply it’s own public cloud expertise (with SaaS offerings like Office 365 and Azure’s PaaS) to the private cloud space – which really translates for MS into Hyper-V and System Center (2012).

This was followed by sessions on the main individual System Center components:

Virtual Machine Manager, Opalis (now System Center Orchestrator), Operations Manager with AVIcode, Configuration Manager and Service Manager.

The SCVMM session really was the highlight (not because that’s the area I’m most interested in), it simply has evolved the most, whether you look at the holistic cloud resource view (public/hybrid/private) provided through Concero (the new web interface), the “fabric” management concept (System, network, storage), the integrated service templates capabilities and the user/consumer centric approach with it’s delegation and self service capabilities. This is without getting into the specific technical improvements like dynamic (workload) optimisation, power management, clearly improved virtual networking etc etc ….

Yes, I admit, I found myself thinking several times “hm, just like vCenter…” and yes, Microsoft is clearly trying to close the gap in the hypervisor and direct virtualization management and to be honest … its not looking bad. Some of the painful ‘basic’ holes in the matrix will be fixed: To speak “VMwareish” … DRS (without SCOM): “tick”, DPM: “tick”, vApp-like multi vm constructs: “tick” (although really different), host profiles (basic): “tick” …just to name a few….

But a) there are still holes and b) we compare currently against vShere 4 …. We should bare in mind that by the time SCVMM 2012 is out we will look at VMware’s next gen product … so how many new “holes” will have been created…? As I am part of the beta program I can’t cover any of this but if you have followed what has been leaked so far publicly you will have an idea ….

But let’s make no mistake here, just comparing the hypervisor ‘nuts and bolts’ features would be foolish, SCVMM clearly wants to take the battle to the private cloud and here it will also directly compete with vCloud Director and it’s components like Request Manager, Connector etc. ..

So if Microsoft integrates all this functionality into VMM and keeps the price low then this will pose a challenge to VMware which clearly sees this as a high value product with the appropriate price tag…

Now VMM is just one part of the System Center suite. Specifically Opalis (orchestrator) certainly deserves more coverage another time. The criticality of a powerful orchestration tool has become clear to all dealing with the integration issues of an end to end automated “cloud” management stack – which in reality is today often made up of a collection of individual management packages with their own legacies. So the glue orchestration provides here is very much key.

So did I get the sense of excitement I hoped for … unfortunately not entirely, its difficult to put a finger on this but something was missing. The rather random demo scenarios (after a good start with vmm) probably didn’t help – a single end to end demo thread throughout the day would have helped to position SC as a suite rather than individual components. But it was all just a little too subdued, a little too matter of fact, now maybe that’s just me ….

Still a worthwhile event and it reinforced that MS is now playing seriously in the virtualization landscape and more increasingly one to watch in the private cloud space (IMHO MS had a rather compelling public cloud strategy for some time)

Andy

### Archived Article – thanks to Andreas Groth – WhatMatrix Community Affiliate (originally published on Virtualizationmatrix.com) ###

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