System Center Suite Overview

The System Center suite is a cohesive group of products, each targeting specific systems management functionality, directed at managing the IT life cycle. It’s important to place the SCVMM 2008 functionality in the context of the broader System Center suite (see Figure 11-1).

Four main software components of the System Center family of products offer management capabilities to the physical and virtual infrastructure. As a virtualization professional, you need to understand the capabilities of each component and how each applies to managing Microsoft and non-Microsoft virtualization platforms.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

SCVMM lets you perform heterogeneous hypervisor management by managing Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, as well as Hyper-V and VMware ESX hypervisors. SCVMM provides you with all the functionality for managing virtualization hosts and guests as well as the framework for enhancing virtualization management with application-level knowledge.