Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2007 R2 planned for H1 2008

From its corporate blog Brad Anderson, General Manager of Leading Product Development and Engineering for Microsoft’s Management and Solutions Division, discloses planned release period for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 R2:

For Windows Server 2008, new management packs/agents for MOM 2005 and SC Operations Manager 2007 will be available in H1. Along those lines, we’ll also have a release of System Center Configuration Manager (formerly SMS) and a second release of Virtual Machine Manager to manage virtualized workloads enabled with Windows Server Virtualization. With the release of VMM, System Center can manage the physical and virtual assets. We developed this technology as, increasingly, customers told us they want a single, unified solution for managing both. I’ve met plenty of customers with physical servers in the datacenter operating at only 15% CPU capacity. SC Virtual Machine Manager assesses and then consolidates suitable server workloads onto virtual machine host infrastructure; this frees up physical resources for repurposing or hardware retirement…

Public beta for this new SCVMM version is expected for Q1 2008 instead, as virtualization.info detailed in SCVMM 2007 beta 2 announcement.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.