With System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) now RTM, we've moved a step closer to delivering a truly compelling virtualisation story to our customers and partners - something that will really come to life when Windows Server Virtualisation becomes a reality in 2008 (adding x64 and multi-proc guest support).

As an integrated component of our System Center family of management technologies, SCVMM takes a slightly different approach to VM management than our main competitors....and this is where we have a significant advantage: System Center can manage both physical and virtual systems as well as their associated workloads from a single management platform.

So what's SCVMM got to offer? Here's what I think are the main highlights:

• A centralised console to view all physical and virtual resources and associated tasks - based on the standard 'Outlook style' System Center look. Everything in the console is built on Powershell, so its all scriptable (great for command line gurus and ISVs)
• Tight integration with Operations Manager 2007, delivered via the VMM Management Pack, allowing you to surface up VM specific data, tasks and reports in your main Operations Manager console
• P2V conversions, including VSS-based conversions of Windows 2003 with no downtime.
• V2V conversions of existing VMware VMs - now this should come in handy ;-)
• End user self provisioning of VMs and intelligent placement to ensure VMs are created on the most appropriate physical host

If this sound interesting, I'd strongly recommend you take a look at Edwin Yuen's recently released Managing Virtualization with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Webcast - it provides an overview of our virtualisation strategy and then dives a little deeper into SCVMM and integration with Operations Manager. There's also a trial VM of SCVMM that you can download here, drop into your environment and begin testing SCVMM straight away. Licensing and R2 snippets to follow shortly.  [RH]