System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta is out!

This is the release a lot of people have been waiting for. A beta of VMM that supports Hyper-V. The team has worked extremely hard over the last few months to get this ready for MMS (the Microsoft Management Summit that is happening right now in Vegas).

Some of the key features that went into this release (you can also find more detailed descriptions on the connect site):

-Clustering support. You can now add host clusters into VMM and perform quick-migratons of your virtual machines

-PRO (performance resource optimization). This provides you with a way to integrate with OpsMgr to surface into VMM a set of application specific alerts from your virtual machines. These PRO Tips (as we call them), can have remedial actions (i.e. you can implement an action to solve this alert)

-Delegated administration. We have listened to our customer feedback from VMM 2007 and this is one of the key ones. With the virtualization environments getting larger and larger, the need for delegated or scoped administration was become essential.

-Support for managing Hyper-V and VMware VCenter

I will be blogging about more VMM features as the beta rolls out and customers start using it.

You can download the beta from: https://connect.microsoft.com/ (or if you are attending MMS, you can go get a physical CD with the bits on it). The download should be available within the next 48 hours.

RTM is estimated to come out in early H2 CY2008.