Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is a management solution for the virtualized datacenter, enabling administrators to configure and manage their virtualization hosts, networking, and storage resources in order to create and deploy virtual machines and services to private clouds.
This book covers the features of VMM 2012 SP1 and Windows 2012, the architectural design, and deployment planning, and is full of tips, techniques, and solutions. It will guide you through creating, deploying, and managing your own private cloud with a mix of hypervisors such as Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, and Citrix XenServer.
This book is about designing and implementing a private cloud by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and its integration components (WSUS and SQL), System Center Operations Manager, and System Center App Controller. It is perfect for presales, solutions architects, technical consultants, business solutions, technical advisors, administrators, and virtualization lovers aiming to gain knowledge about the System Center family of products.
I encourage you to spend some time on Chapter 1, VMM 2012 Architecture, in which I talk about the design of the solution as well the requirements based on deployment size and real- world implementation.
As someone who is passionate about virtualization and management, I really love this product. I have been working with it since its early stages back in 2007, and it is amazing to see how far the product has gone on to help with management tasks.
You will learn about VMM architecture and planning for real-word deployment, network virtualization, gateway integration, storage integration, resource throttling, availability options, and Operations Manager (SCOM) deployment and integration with VMM. You will also learn about App Controller (SCAC) deployment and integration with VMM to manage a private and public cloud (Azure), bare metal cluster deployment with VMM, creation and deployment of virtual machines from templates, and deployment of a High Available VMM management server. Apart from this, you will also learn about the management of Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix XenServers from VMM, upgrading from SCVMM 2008 R2, WSUS integration for remediation, and many other features of VMM 2012 SP1.
Chapter 1, VMM 2012 Architecture, is designed to provide an understanding of the underlying VMM modular architecture, which is useful when troubleshooting VMM and improving implementation. Make sure you spend some extra time on this chapter.
Chapter 2, Installing SCVMM 2012, is designed to provide tips for shortening and automating processes while installing VMM 2012 and VMM 2012 SP1 and covers SQL installation, Active Directory containers for security and HA, and Run As accounts to automate and manage credentials through VMM.
Chapter 3, Installing the VMM Management Server, provides an understanding of how Virtual Machine Manager has become a critical part of the private cloud infrastructure. This chapter will walk you through the recipes to implement a Highly Available VMM server with useful tips and tricks.
Chapter 4, Configuring Fabric Resources in VMM, provides detailed recipes for the configuration and management of Fabric Resources, which are extremely powerful when configuring resources for hosts, virtual machines, and services. It provides information for the configuration and management of the virtualization host, networking, storage, and library resources. The recipes will allow you to get more out of this impressive feature and will help you to understand the logical flow, from preparing the infrastructure to making the infrastructure building blocks available to a private cloud.
Chapter 5, Deploying Virtual Machines and Services, provides information to help the Administrator create, deploy, and manage private clouds, virtual machines, templates, and services in System Center VMM 2012 and also provides you with recipes to assist you with getting the most out of deployment.
Chapter 6, Upgrading from SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1, provides recipes to allow you to smoothen the migration process from System Center 2008 R2 SP1 to System Center 2012 SP1, and includes tips and tricks for this purpose.
Chapter 7, Scripting in Virtual Machine Manager, provides a useful understanding of VMM PowerShell, which allows you to perform all VMM administrative functions by using commands or scripts. You will also find some useful sample scripts in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Managing VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer Hosts, provides tips and techniques to allow you to integrate VMM directly with VMware vCenter Server, and also with Citrix XenServer, to manage and make their resources available for private cloud deployments. It also provides recipes to help you manage the day-to-day operations of VMware ESX/ESXi and Citrix XenServer hosts and clusters, such as the discovery and management of hosts and the ability to create, manage, store, place, and deploy virtual machines and templates, all from the VMM console.
Chapter 9, Managing Hybrid Clouds, Fabric Updates, Creating Clusters and New Features of SP1, provides recipes making use of more of the improvements provided in VMM 2012. The chapter also explores some of the key features of Service Pack 1, such as Linux VMs, availability options, and resource throttling. Additionally, it also provides recipes to integrate VMM with System Center App Controller 2012 SP1 for Hybrid Cloud Management.
Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1, provides tips and techniques to allow administrators to integrate SCOM 2012 with SCVMM when monitoring the private cloud infrastructure. You can download this chapter for free from our website, www.packtpub.com, using the following link:
This book is based on System Center 2012 SP1. In order to take full advantage of this book, you will need to have an understanding of Microsoft virtualization technologies (such as Hyper-V) as well as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1, System Center App Controller 2012 SP1, SQL 2012, and Windows 2012 media.
This book is well suited for presales, solutions architects, technical consultants, business solutions, technical advisors, administrators, and virtualization lovers.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The local agent installation information is logged in the C:\ProgramData\VMMLogs hidden folders."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
C:\>nslookup xen-host1 C:\>ping -a xen-host1
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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