Making the Case for System Center Virtual Machine Manager

SCVMM with SP1 introduces multiple benefits for managing a virtual environment. Business leaders and product acquisition teams might be looking at this product to help their organizations manage both Hyper-V and ESX platforms. It’s simple to see the ROI by deploying both VMware and Microsoft admins together to manage sometimes sprawling and often heterogeneous environments. This is all done through a platform that’s built on the System Center framework, which is becoming increasingly popular with IT admins, no matter the organization.

But what about the big picture? Business leaders are still asking IT teams for a virtualization strategy, a cloud strategy, or just to become more ‘green.’ SCVMM helps to resolve these issues. So an important question for admins to ask is, ‘How will this product steer my virtualization strategy?’

SCVMM does a great job managing VMware and Hyper-V environments. Admittedly, it still has a few gaps when it comes to managing some networking aspects of ESX hosts. And yes, many of us would like to see either the .vhd or the .vmdk formats become standardized or compatible between products, but those don’t address business needs, they address technical desires.

This is where SCVMM makes a business case to justify itself. Admins know it’s easier to get approval for a Windows Server license with Hyper-V versus justifying new and recurring costs of ESX host licenses. Virtualization admins will make the case to implement Hyper-V as it’s more compatible with the management product. In the meantime, SCVMM is sufficiently and easily managing vCenter and ESX hosts all the while giving IT folks the tools they need to migrate machines to different hosts, quickly and easily perform V2V conversions, and start automating administration tasks within their environment.

This is not to say VMware tools are not powerful and capable of doing a great job on their own. But admins do have to face up to the challenges of managing mixed environments, and provide a secure ‘cloud’ strategy that business leaders can safely adopt and IT managers can rely on to help them manage growth.