For those who are heavy into the System Center suite of products like my friends Garth and Brad are, you’ll be interested in knowing that System Center Virtual Machine Manager has been released to manufacturing. One of the things that jumped out at me about this product is that it supports VMware ESX along with Hyper-V and Virtual Server. I think this is really nice if you do use the other System Center products for managing your environment but don’t use Microsoft’s virtualization product, you can now integrate your virtual machines into your management strategy. I know of a few government organizations in Ottawa who run like this so this will help them better manage their environment.
Key features include the ability to do Physical to Virtual migrations, Intelligent Placement which helps you find the best virtual host for a VM and managing Hyper-V clusters. Information on the product can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/default.aspx.