14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to manufacturing on August 24th, 2009, and is already permitting customers to test drive the solution. The gold development milestone of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 started being offered on the Microsoft Download Center at the beginning of this week as a trial release, but it won’t be available for purchase until after September 2009.
“System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has RTM’d and GA via volume licensing is set for October 1. This is great news for all and I’d like to especially thank our VMM 2008 R2 Development, Product Management, and Test teams. Lots of hard work fueled by their passion in virtualization and management has resulted in a very good software release,” revealed Zane Adam, senior director, virtualization and management. “A 180-day evaluation version is now available, too, on the Microsoft Download site.”
The software giant has made sure that VMM 2008 R2 will play nice with all existing virtualized environments and platforms that can be managed with VMM 2008. In addition, VMM 2008 R2 comes with support for the latest iteration of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the platform’s virtualization technology, namely Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.
“Please experience for yourself what the 10,000+ people who have previously downloaded our ‘Release Candidate’ plus organizations such as Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Technologies, and Indiana University have seen with VMM 2008 R2,” Adam said. “I encourage everyone to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4.”
In this regard, the Redmond company informed that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM brought to the table enhancements over its precursor, including live migration support and hot add of storage. Below is a list with additional features:
- Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) support that enables multiple Highly Available Virtual Machines (HAVM) per LUN. - Support for VMWare vSphere 4 (VMware VI3 feature parity only) - SAN Migration into and out of clustered hosts - Processor flexibility - Network optimization - Quick storage migration - Maintenance mode for hosts - Support for third party cluster file system, Sanbolic Melio FS - Support for third party storage class resource, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows - Expanded support for iSCSI SANs - Support for VMware port groups for virtual switches - Support for Virtual Machine permissions assigned in Hyper-V - Dynamic policy based load balancing
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM is available for download here.