Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Hyper-V give you a complete management and virtualisation solution. The scenario I’m in is unique and often confuses server/storage people. Most virtualisation scenarios are pretty static, e.g. “We have 100 servers and we’ll virtualise them. We might add a few every year”. When we started we had this statement “We have zero servers and we hope to add as many customer VM’s as possible every year”. So if our business does well and thrives, we’ll be growing non-stop and in an increasing manner. Management of performance and health are critical. OpsMgr 2007 SP1 integrates with VMM 2008 and gives us that.
But what about configuration? We’ll add hosts pretty frequently. I have a WDS image that has 99% of the configuration done. However, the generation of blades we used at the start is now being replaced by HP. That means a new generation. There’s a probability that we’ll have alternate build types for specific projects too. I want to make sure we do things according to best practices. Up to now, that’s been a manual inspection process followed by responding to alerts in VMM and OpsMgr. Then we’d roll out the machine in pilot to test it. Finally I could push it out.
MS has released a tool called the VMM 2008 Configuration Analyser:
“The VMMCA is a diagnostic tool you can use to evaluate important configuration settings for computers that either are serving or might serve VMM roles or other VMM functions. The VMMCA scans the hardware and software configurations of the computers you specify, evaluates them against a set of predefined rules, and then provides you with error messages and warnings for any configurations that are not optimal for the VMM role or other VMM function that you have specified for the computer.
Note The VMMCA does not duplicate or replace the prerequisite checks performed during the setup of VMM 2008 components.
Before installing VMM, you can use the VMMCA to help you evaluate the configuration of computers that you might use for the following VMM roles:
- VMM server
- VMM Administrator Console
- VMM Self-Service Portal
After installing VMM, you can use the VMMCA to evaluate the configurations of computers that you are now using or might use for the VMM roles listed above, as well as computers that you are using or might use for any of the following VMM functions:
- Windows Server–based host
- VMware Virtual Center Server
- P2V source computer
- Operations Manager agent”
So now I can fire up this tool on existing servers to analyse them to ensure that things are good.
If you’re still on VMM 2007 then please go here instead.