System Center Virtual Machine Manager - Part 1

UPDATE: Changed post title from "Day1" to "Part1"...

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (Beta1) was made avialble on https://connect.microsoft.com site.

For more information (assuming you haven't downloaded it yourself) can be found here and here, thanks David for the links. I won't repeat the details already posted, but after 7hours of testing (a.k.a pressing every button to see what they do
– obviously in a controlled and scientific fashion ;-) ), the product looks very good and stable (just one MMC hang).

We set-up our SCVMM server to control two other servers, one of which was a newly built Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 Server (no Virtual Server 2005 installed), the other a workhorse of a system running Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 and Virtual Server 2004 R2 (amongst other things!). On the newly built machine, we performed a remote agent install and Virtual Server 2005 R2 install (cool), note that IIS on that host isn't required which is nice - this went extremely smoothly. On the other machine we tried to add the agent locally (to test that scenario), however this didn't seem to work (questions have been raised) an automated agent install (from the SCVMM server fixed it). We suspect this server isn't typical as it runs a variety of beta software...that’s our excuse (thanks to Julius for the funny server).
It was great to see that all the Virtual Machines (guests) on the problematic server were discovered and displayed in the GUI, as a bonus the Self-Service Portal also showed these as well (see Tony’s post above for details on Self-Service).

Basically a productive day, with loads more details (and a few screenshots I hope) to follow...

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager site is here.