So what's next?

Well, SCVMM VNext of course.....the team is already hard at work on the next release to align with the Windows Server 2008 R2 hypervisor update. Like this release, there will be a short gap between the platform update and the management update but we'll align the releases as close as possible (incidentally, the reason it takes us a little extra time is because once the platform has shipped and everything is "locked", we still need to run through a final battery of tests and stabilization just to make sure everything works as advertised). As we showed back in September, Live Migration will make it's debut in Windows Server 2008 R2 and SCVMM VNext will take advantage of that feature in addition to all of the other new functionality going into the R2 release.

An "R2" server release isn't as large of an incremental update as compared to a completely new major release version of the server OS. This tends to make it easier to adopt since the retesting/certification of applications effort can be more scoped. Of course, if you're using Hyper-V strictly as a virtual machine host and running business applications inside of virtual machines, it will be very straightforward to upgrade to 2K8 R2 since the applications will be isolated from the hypervisor OS update. SCVMM 2008 already supports the VMware VMotion feature directly and indirectly via PRO so adding live migration support isn't going to "change the game" if you will. The key thing we'll continue to invest in and improve is providing the best possible application knowledge so that you know *when* to execute a live migration, *which* applications need calibration and *what" that calibration should be. The beauty of PRO is that it is fully extensible and we can continue to provider a richer experience with improved knowledge incrementally between major and minor updates to SCVMM. On top of that, we're not doing it alone - our partners are coming to market with PRO enabled management packs for System Center so stay tuned for more news on that front.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be blogging about some of our future direction along with more in-depth posts about getting maximum value from SCVMM 2008 features.

Rakesh

P.S. 

I will be in Barcelona @ Tech Ed EMEA next week along with several members of my team. If you are planning to be there, please drop by our booth and introduce yourself. You'll also see a glimpse of SCVMM VNext in the keynote address.....