This chapter has recipes that will help administrators use VMM 2012 R2 to manage daily operations of VMware ESX and Citrix hosts and host clusters, such as the identification and management of hosts. In addition, it will provide you with the ability to create, manage, save, and deploy VMs on VMware ESX and Citrix hosts, all from the VMM console.

System Center 2012 has the concept of a fabric, which is made up of hosts, host groups, and library servers, as well as networking and storage configurations. This architecture abstracts the underlying infrastructure from the users but lets them deploy VMs, applications, and services irrespective of whether the infrastructure is running on the Microsoft hypervisor technology or hypervisors from VMware or Citrix.

As multiple hypervisors can be managed through a common console, we can deploy VMs and applications in a consistent manner and get the same capabilities from different hypervisors. We can choose to utilize a mix of hypervisors...