14 DAY TRIAL // System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 was released to manufacturing at the start of this week and is currently available for download from Microsoft. But the Redmond company is not offering customers only the management solution for virtualized datacenters, but also additional resources designed to streamline the deployment and usage of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM in certain scenarios. In this regard, one of the most important downloads customers can access along with the trial version of VMM 2008 R2 is designed to contain known issues that have survived the development process beyond the RTM stage.
The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Release Notes contain information related to problems customers might come across when test-driving the successor of VMM 2008. The documentation informs users that “after upgrading to VMM 2008 R2 from VMM 2008, the VMM agent on the nodes of a highly available VMM library server are not updated to the VMM 2008 R2 version until VMM runs a periodic library refresh. By default, a library refresh is run every hour. You cannot manually refresh a library server,” according to Microsoft.
Customers can also download the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Cmdlet Reference, documentation offering Help topics for VMM 2008 R2 cmdlets. “System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 is a server application that you can use to manage virtual machines on a variety of virtualization platforms. As an alternative to using the VMM Administrator Console to administer your Virtual Machine Manager environment, you can use the cmdlets in the Windows PowerShell - Virtual Machine Manager command shell, which is an administrator-focused command-line shell,” the Redmond company noted.
In addition, the VMM2008 R2 - Building PRO-Enabled Management Packs documentation is offered via the Microsoft Download Center. As the name implies, the resource is set up to offer an insight into how to build PRO-enabled management packs for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. Customers that will leverage the documentation will be guided through the steps necessary to put together a PRO-enabled management pack.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 RTM is available for download here.