Earlier this week, virtualization.info quoted an article published by Marcel van den Berg about the some of the new capabilities that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 will provide. Microsoft publicly discussed them during its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a few weeks ago.
Now van den Berg has published a valuable follow-up post, focusing on what is new in SCVMM 2012 about storage and networking. Here’s a few key points:
- SCVMM 2012 will have two main roles: Service Management (lifecycle management of virtual machines and applications inside them) and Fabric Management (configuration management of computing, networking and storage)
- Communication with the storage layer will happen through SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) providers. SCVMM 2010 will be able to provision LUNs at the cluster level
- Capability to create logical networks (abstracting IP subnetting, VLANs, and DNS domains) for private cloud computing
- Capability to define and assign IP pools to logical networks, as well as MAC address pools to host groups
- Capability to copy a VM template from SAN to SAN on provisioning
- Support for Citrix NetScaler as load balancer to create Virtual Private Addresses (VIPs) and assign them to services
The screenshots published by the author reveal that the product is already available as Community Technology Preview (CTP):
He suggests that some of the features above, like the use of SMI-S providers comes from the technology partnership with Citrix, which is already implementing this approach in its Essentials for Hyper-V through the StorageLink Technology.
A recent comment made by Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center and Cloud division at Citrix, seems to support the idea that his company is helping Microsoft in developing a better virtualization stack.
van den Berg also reveals a little more specific time frame for the release of SCVMM 2012: H2 2011.