On March 22nd at MMS 2011 this year, we announced the Beta for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Our customers are telling us it is about the “Service”. They want to better manage their infrastructure while providing more levels of self-service and faster time to implementation. With VMM 2012 our customers will be able to provide all of this.

But VMM 2012 is different from VMM 2008 R2 SP1, and it can be a challenge to understand all of the new capabilities. With that, our VMM Program Management Team has created a series of blogs that provide more depth and detail into the new features and scenarios that VMM enables.

Check out the VMM blog and all of the new posts detailing all of the new capabilities. Some of these have already been posted, and there are plans for many more. I wanted to point you to these, and let you know our plans for some future posts. Check these that are available now:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta Available Now!
• SCVMM 2012 Beta Overview
• SCVMM 2012- Creating a Highly Available VMM Server
• Integrating Load balancers into SCVMM 2012 Beta
• VMM 2012  Logical Network Definitions and subnet-VLAN pairs in Logical Networks
• Storage Automation in VMM 2012
• How to deploy the PetShop application as a service in SCVMM 2012
• Using SCVMM 2012, NetApp SMI-S provider and Visio to visualize storage
• SCVMM 2012 Networking Best Practices for Hyper-V deployments
• Host Power Control in SCVMM 2012

And more of the themes coming in the near future:

• VMM 2012 OOB and OSD
• VMM 2012  Provision a Cluster
• VMM 2012 Private Cloud - Create a Private Cloud/Delegate a Private Cloud/
• VMM 2012 PRO/Monitoring/Reporting
• VMM 2012 Xen Support
• VMM 2012  Dynamic Optimization
• VMM 2012  Update Management- Hyper-V Orchestrated Cluster Patching
• VMM 2012  Library- Creating and Using Resource Groups
• VMM 2012 Services Overview
• VMM 2012 Creating Virtual Application Packages with Microsoft Virtualization Sequencer
• VMM 2012 Service Templates
• VMM 2012 Service Deployment
• VMM 2012 Service Servicing
• VMM 2012 Service Template Import/Export
• VMM 2012 Service Deployment – Troubleshooting Tips
• VMM 2012 Service Scale in/Scale Out

Thank you to the Program Management Team for giving us this detail and insight into our new Beta. Also, check out the Server Application Virtualization blog that explains in more depth Server App-V from the Server App-V.

Finally, if you are interested in a more guided evaluation, check out the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program beginning May 26, and go here to fill out the application.

Enjoy the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta, and please let us know how it is going.

Kenon Owens

Technical Product Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager