Introduction
This chapter has been designed to provide an understanding of the underlying Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) modular architecture, which is useful for improving implementation and troubleshooting VMM.
As a reference, this book is based on the System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager version.
The first version of VMM was launched in 2007 and was designed to manage virtual machines. The VMM 2012 version is a huge product change that will now give you the power to manage your own private cloud.
The focus of VMM 2012 is the ability to create and manage private clouds, retain the characteristics of public clouds by allowing tenants and delegated VMM administrators to perform functions, and abstract the underlying fabric to let them deploy the VM's applications and services. Although they have no visibility into the underlying hardware, there is a uniform resource pooling that allows you to add or remove the capacity as your environment grows. VMM also supports private clouds across supported hypervisors, such as Hyper-V, Citrix, and VMware.
The main strategies of VMM 2012 are as follows:
- Application focus: VMM abstracts fabric (host servers, storage, and networking) into a unified pool of resources. It also gives you the ability to use Server App-V to deploy applications and SQL Server profiles to deploy customized database servers.
- Service consumer: One of the powerful features of VMM 2012 is its capability to deploy a service to a private cloud. These services are dependent on multiple VMs that are tied together (for example, web frontend servers, application servers, and backend database servers). These services can be provisioned as simply as provisioning a VM, but they all should be provisioned together.
- Dynamic Optimization: This strategy will balance the workload in a cluster, while a feature called Power Optimization can turn off physical virtualization host servers when they are not needed. It can then turn them back on when the load increases. This process will automatically move VMs between hosts to balance the load.
- Multivendor hypervisor support: The list of managed hypervisors has been extended. VMM 2012 now manages Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix XenServer, covering all of the major hypervisors on the market.
The following figure highlights VMM Multivendor hypervisor support:
Knowing your current environment – assessment
This is the first step. You need to do an assessment of your current environment to find out how and where the caveats are. You can use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit (download it from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826) or any other assessment tool to help you carry out a report assessment by querying the hardware, OS, application, and services. It is important to define what you can and need to address and, sometimes, what you cannot virtualize.
Tip
The MAP toolkit will assess your environment using agentless technology to collect data (inventory and performance) to provide reports. Server Consolidation, VMware Discovery , Microsoft Workload Discovery, and Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Onboarding Assessment are some of the useful reports that will enable your IT infrastructure planning. For more information, refer to http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1640.microsoft-assessment-and-planning-toolkit.aspx.
Currently, Microsoft supports the virtualization of all MS infrastructure technologies (for example, SQL, Exchange, AD, Lync, IIS, and file server).
Designing the solution
With the assessment report in hand, it is recommended that you spend a reasonable amount of time on the solution design and architecture, and you will have a solid and consistent implementation. The following figure highlights the new VMM 2012 features for you to take into consideration when working on your private cloud design:
Creating the private cloud fabric
In VMM, before deploying VMs and services to a private cloud, you need to set up the private cloud fabric. There are three resources that are included in the fabric in VMM 2012, which are as follows:
- Servers: These contain virtualization hosts (Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix servers) and groups, Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE), update servers (that is, Windows Server Update Services), and other servers.
- Networking: This contains the network fabric and devices' configuration (for example, gateways, virtual switches, and network virtualization); it presents the wiring between resource repositories, running instances, VMs, and services.
- Storage: This contains the configuration for storage connectivity and management, simplifying storage complexities, and the way storage is virtualized. It is here that you configure the SMI-S and SMP providers or a Windows 2012 SMB 3.0 file server.
If you are really serious about setting up a private cloud, you should carry out a virtualization assessment using MAP, as discussed earlier, and work on a detailed design document that covers the hardware, hypervisor, fabric, and management. With this in mind, the implementation will be pretty straightforward.
System Center 2012 will help you install, configure, manage, and monitor your private cloud from the fabric to the hypervisor and up to the service deployment. It will also allow you to manage the public cloud (Azure).
Note
Refer to the Designing the VMM server, database, and console implementation recipe in this chapter for further information.
