In addition to having a name that doesn’t fit nicely in the context of a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), there are some other potential frusterations that you may run into during the install of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 if you don’t do some upfront planning.
I will start of by disclaiming that this article is composed completely off my own experience and research with the product as I’m just starting into the Hyper-V realm. If anyone has any other thoughts or knows differently, please feel free to comment.
The System Center interface is notably, in my opinion, one of the foremost selling points for Microsoft’s virtualization platform. In addition to a familiar, intuitive interface for managing your Hyper-V virtual machines in Virtual Machine Manager, you can also connect to ESX Virtual Center and manage your ESX farm from the same interface. Add SSOM and you can manage your physical machines (if anyone still has any of those laying around). All-in-all Microsoft already has a solid and very powerful systems management platform in the System Center product line, and Virtual Machine Manager fits right in and doesn’t disappoint.
As far as the installation goes… it didn’t flow as nicely as I would have liked.
- SQL Server service needed to be running under the same account as the SSVMM service.
- The SSVMM service needed to be a domain account with rights to retrieve group membership in AD.
- The account that the SSVMM connects to the SQL Server Database needed to be the same as the one that the service was running under.
In addition, we have found that using vCenter (and the VI Client) side-by-side with SSVMM to manange ESX doesn’t work really well. Like many Microsoft products SSVMM tends to think that it knows what you are intending to do. For example if you use vCenter to disconnect a host for maintenance, SSVMM kicks in and automatically trys to reconnect it. Also, if you want to stop managing a host in SSVMM, removing it… well, completely removes (unregisters) it from vCenter. So, I would recommend that it you are going to use SSVMM to manage your virtual infrastructure, you should do so as exclusively as possible.