Management tools available for Hyper-V

Here are the various management and automation products available to users of the Microsoft Hyper-V environment. If there are any platforms that I am missing, please feel free to drop me a note and alert me to it!

• Microsoft Hyper-V Microsoft Management Console (MMC) – Basic management tool available to manage Hyper-V hosts which are either local or remote. You can manage and set the Hyper-V server settings using this. With this administration tool, you can also do basic tasks on your Hyper-V host like creating a VM, changing the settings of a VM, getting to the settings of disk, memory, network etc. Once the VM is created, you can start/stop/snapshot a VM and also connect to the VM using a built in virtual machine connector. All in all, a basic tool to get you started with Hyper-V.
• Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) – This is a more advanced management product that is currently available in beta from Microsoft. The final GA of the product is expected in September 2008. You can read more about the functionality of SCVMM here and here. Some of the key points to note about SCVMM are:
  1. Support for managing Microsoft and VMware VM environments (Full integration with Virtual Center (VC). In fact, SCVMM requires VC in order to integrate with VMware)
  2. P2V, V2V, Manage physical and virtual machines
  3. Features to handle failure scenarios, HA, cluster awareness
  4. Administrative control (identifying consolidation candidates, intelligent placement, quotas, library, templates, scripting etc.)

  All in all, SCVMM is geared well as a management application if you are deploying VMs in production. (Added 9/9) – You can read a full post on SCVMM on the Microsoft technet site.

• VMLogix LabManager - If you are interested in using Hyper-V in your software development or test lab, then VMLogix LabManager can help with the management. If you are not sure why you need a management product in your dev/test lab, then consider reading this. If you are new to virtual lab automation, then you might want to read this guest post to get some familiarity with VLA. VMLogix will provide you with the following management benefits – self-service IT (hands off management allowing your lab users to gain access to lab resources based on some bounded policies/quotas etc.), centralized lab management across multiple hypervisors (which will control VM sprawl), powerful automation and optimization of lab resources (including storage via linked clones).

Demo of VMLogix LabManager working with Microsoft Hyper-V, with a highlight on the benefits of the solution.

VMLogix LabManager and Microsoft Hyper-V

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Beyond these, I have come across the following 2 projects on CodePlex: PowerShell management library for Hyper-V and Hyper-V Web Manager.

References:

1. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Key Features
2. Creating and managing virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V
3. rakeshm’s VM Management blog
4. What’s new in System Center VMM 2008
5. System Center Features
6. Microsoft Hyper-V guide (SearchServerVirtualization.com)

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