System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

SCVMM 2007 is Microsoft's outstanding product for managing multiple Virtual Server instances across your enterprise. Frankly, I loved it. It made dealing with VS so much easier, and allowed me to build a library of solutions that I could quickly and easily deploy on any server in my environment. It was a huge time saver, and really easy to work with. All in all, one of the best Microsoft "version 1" products I've worked with. But then I moved my environment to Hyper-V, since I had to be able to support 64-bit guests. (Actually "child partitions" in Hyper-V terms.) Both Cougar and Centro (more properly known as "Windows Small Business Server 2008" and "Windows Essential Business Server 2008" or simply SBS2k8 and EBS) are based on Windows Server 2008 x64, so I clearly needed to move to Hyper-V.

Unfortunately, SCVMM 2007 doesn't support Hyper-V, at all. So I've been impatiently waiting for a version of SCVMM that did. And now, finally, there is a public beta for SCVMM 2008. The link here is to a self-nomination page for the beta, but if you have trouble with the link, just go to Connect, log in, and find the link for SCVMM 2008.

Charlie.