Microsoft strengthens multi-platform virtualization management

The System Center application controller negotiates with the Virtual Machine Manager module to bring more powerful control mechanisms to the virtualized environment. Before that, in a series of evaluations, we have done some research and discussion on orchestrator and Configuration Manager's two major system Center modules. Today, our research objects are application controllers, virtual machine managers, and data protection managers, which are more refined and more powerful in some cases.

Where the new application controller and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) This pair of partners is the most interesting combination of these managers. Two modules are complementary and harmonious. The role of an application controller is to deploy a virtual machine in a facility that covers a private cloud, a legacy local management environment, or a public cloud, of course Windows Azure is included.

Although VMM itself does not perform as well on its own platform as tools such as Citrix and VMware, users can use these Microsoft management tools to bring Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and VMware Vsphere and other platforms from different vendors blended into a mixed business environment, from this point of view VMM also has a strong sense of existence.

The last and most "boring" module is the Data Protection Manager, which is boring because the data protection mechanism is an essential part of any system-but it does not mean that it is functionally so-so. The data Protection Manager consists of a series of monitoring backup components designed to provide protection for Microsoft applications and servers. Despite the lack of surprises, we are still happy to find a new feature in it: bare-metal restore. This function can not only help the device back to the initial state, but also to help users in an emergency time to effectively reduce losses.

These components are installed through unified installer, and the Setup Wizard warns users that it is best not to install these modules separately. As with other system Center 2012 applications, their operations also require support from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 review or other SQL Server (the latter as a fallback scenario).

The most compelling and global feature of our tests is the VMM's integrated control of Citrix XenServer and VMware vsphere ESXi infrastructures. Although we already have Hyper-V, we decided to look at VMM's performance, given the fact that the test object was the two major competitors of Hyper-V and the server instance load that was running was quite high. We've also got Azure accounts from Microsoft, dedicated to this cloud control test.

During the preparation process, we have to make several adjustments according to the actual situation. For example, the large storage pools we host in the Dell Compellent San use the Network File System (NFS), but to use these resource pools, VMM requires us to change the resource attributes to "read-write"--doing so would pose a security risk to our workflows. However, in order to figure out the true level of VMM 2012 (and further manage it through the application controller), we have to weigh it over and over again and decide to make changes.

Next, we guided the VMM by name to find our Citrix and ESXi management program equipment; The VMM reacted rapidly, quickly finding active virtual machines and closed virtual machine collections under various server types. XenServer each resource type that corresponds to VMware is enabled, progressively installing various related tools, and adjusting the virtual machine layout for the interaction structure. Migrating an active virtual machine from one platform to another is unrealistic, but it can be implemented under certain circumstances by migrating it from one type of structure to another.

Through our verification of the concept feasibility, the XenServer to XenServer and vsphere to vsphere two kinds of migration have been successful. This does not mean that advanced management infrastructure functions, such as resource matching and advanced Storage pool optimization, can work, and that they are not working properly. But we found that some simple features are achievable, such as Microsoft's published "Single Window Panel" control, which works well in three different management programs that host Windows 2008 R2 server instances.

Overall, the concept can still be implemented-although some advanced features, especially in VMware vsphere, are still not implemented.

VMM 2012 also has another installation scenario, that is, access to a self-service portal through IIS. Choosing this installation scenario poses new challenges to the configuration, and the involvement of the new management allows us to define more roles and allocate more resources. However, we have achieved the virtual machine configuration via the Web, and we have received a service role similar to the access device, which is worth the money.

The internal infrastructure pathways used to locate virtual machines in VMM 2012 are largely hidden, enabling further support for the deployment of class appliances and application instances. Services help users to independently detect installed or virtual machine collections through a specific provision, but Active Directory user roles must be controlled through fairly complex Group Policy object registrations, which requires us to strictly manage the self-service portal to avoid abuse.

The application controller divides resources (including those under public or private hosting) and assigns them to the facility. We conducted a test of virtual machine instance migration from private network to azure instance via the Azure account provided by Microsoft, it turns out that as soon as the initial settings are complete (including azure certificates, keys, and network connections), you can easily migrate the virtual machine instance resources from the local to the azure resource side in a drag-and-drop manner. The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires a large amount of network traffic, which costs more than creating an instance directly in Azure, especially SQL Server.

The application controller can also package virtual cluster groups into an object for the purpose of managing multiple virtual machine instances, such as a complete environment consisting of several network servers and a set of database or service application backend. The application controller and the PowerShell command can also collaborate smoothly, through a script to integrate a variety of management directives to achieve the process of adding and removing user roles, such as the automation of global operations.

Shell scripts can be reused infinitely, automating the frequently clicked UI operation. The disadvantage, however, is that the different PowerShell scripts are somewhat self documented, and their code may not conform to standardized best practices, which in turn cause the application controller to have dependencies on these scripts.

In addition, we can deploy virtual machines in bare metal through Windows Deployment Services (WDS). This feature is based on PXE, the pre-boot execution environment, to fundamentally implement the full deployment of virtual machines through the local network. According to the program, a set of virtual machines will send a PXE signal to the DHCP server after being activated, and the server will, in turn, load the previously selected mirror into the virtual machine according to the settings. This feature must be implemented on the local network (and we have the message to support IPV4 only), and of course, you can also program the router to send the initial PXE traffic to other destinations to complete the virtual machine's network startup request. After initialization is complete, the server can access and load other applications or resources themselves in a variety of ways.

Overall, we often migrate virtual machine mirroring to the PXE boot server (WDS) by modifying the virtual hard disk (VHD)--but we prefer to take advantage of NFS in the lab for preference, which gives the bare-metal a choice of good support for a variety of operating systems.

The combination of application controller 2012 and VMM 2012 is quite powerful and can be a very concise way to incorporate all the controlled resources into system Center 2012. We do not think that this combination will replace the same functionality in existing products, and the introduction of Windows Server 2012 releases and the release of the system Center 2012 Service Pack will bring new changes to the two functional modules. Many of the originally time-consuming and laborious virtual machines and their management cost problems will be solved with the new version.