Besides its cloud computing strategy, Microsoft unveiled a lot about System Center at its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a couple of weeks ago. For example, the audience has been informed that Opalis, the orchestration framework acquired in December 2009, will hit version 3.6 in one week or so, while its integration in System Center won’t happen before 12-15 months.
Even more interesting is what Microsoft said about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012. Marcel van den Berg provided a lot of details about the upcoming feature set, developed to manage private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds:
- Support for Citrix XenServer (5.6? 6.0?) and VMware ESX 4.1
- Hyper-V remote deployment on bare-metal
A new server will boot from PXE, download a WinPE image, download a VHD, join a domain and install the Hyper-V role all automated and orchestrated from SCVMM 2012. - Dynamic Optimization (DO)
Automatic/Manual workloads balancing across Hyper-V hosts in a cluster, without System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).
It will compete with VMware Distribute Resource Scheduler (DRS)
- Enhanced Placement
New 100 checks and validations used by the workload placing algorithm, including manual rules to detail inter-VMs dependencies, defined by the administrator.
It will compete with the VMware DRS affinity rules. - Power Management
Hyper-V hosts will be powered off using DO and Live Migration in case of low hardware utilization.
It will compete with VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). - Administration Delegation
- Resources Quota
- Capacity Management
- more