I’ll briefly mention some of the things I’m really liking that I was unaware of before putting VMM into action.
One of the things I was dreading with a VHD library was disk wastage. PSS don’t like anything other than pass through disks and fixed size VHD’s in production. Without VMM I was building sysprepped dynamically expanding VHD’s. I’d store those in a shared folder. I’d copy the image VHD to a host and then "convert" (it actually creates a new file) the VHD into a fixed size VHD which my new VM would use.
VMM is a little more clever. It allows you to convert a disk in place. I like that. I’m storing my dynamic VHD’s in the library. To save more space I’ve compressed the library – hey, disk is money to us and disk IS NOT CHEAP! I can build a VM and convert the disks to fixed size before powering it up. This means I can conserve disk space in the VMM library and still build fixed size VHD’s from templates without incurring nasty amounts of work.
Without Hyper-V using ISO images for the CD/DVD was a similar painful process -> copy the ISO to the Hyper-V box and load it up. With VMM I can load the ISO into the library and it can be loaded on the VM via the VMM console over the network.
The idea of a template is different in VMM than it is in ESX … or even any OS deployment solution … more MS renaming! It’ll take me a while to get used to but it mightn’t be a bad thing – I have to try it in anger first. A template is a machine configuration, e.g. 1 processor, 2GB RAM, etc. The VHD image is a totally different thing altogether. So that 1 CPU & 2GB RAM machine description can be paired up with different OS images by the looks of it.
I’m seeing more and more how VMM makes managing multiple Hyper-V boxes easier. It is different to ESX which I found quite natural (other than nested resource pools to be honest) but that difference isn’t naturally a bad thing.
BTW, after the early issues that I sorted out (and blogged about) it’s running very sweetly. The diagram view went down very nice with the boss. It’s nice to show the people in charge where all the money went 🙂