Along with System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010 and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 Lab Management, Microsoft is about to release another product that will have extended virtualization capabilities: System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010.
Essentials (to not be confused with Citrix Essentials, which indeed is another management suite for Hyper-V) is a bundle of multiple System Center products, integrated by a single management console, that supports up to 50 servers and 500 clients.
The current version, SCE 2007, merges together System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0.
It doesn’t have any capability to manage Hyper-V because it doesn’t include the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) engine.
The upcoming version instead, now in Release Candidate status, will include the SCVMM 2008 R2 engine, which means that customers will be able to create and operate virtual machines, perform physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations, manipulate templates and snapshots, and more.
It’s not clear if SCE 2010 will be able to manage VMware environments like SCVMM 2008 R2.
Microsoft published a 14-minutes demo here.