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SCVMM 2012 R2

1

1006

n00b
Joined
Jan 28, 2015
Messages
4
Hi there,

I am new to this forum and also to SCVMM.

I would appreciate if someone could help me out with SCVMM 2012 R2.. Basically I am making a study to see if we should go for SCVMM 2012. Can someone mention the best ways or maybe scenarios SCVMM can be used to automate and simplify work for IT Admins.
 
As far as I know, with system center you license the whole suite, not just the individual pieces anymore. That changed in the 2012 release. Also, you license the clients, not the server install. So you either pay for the standard license for a single machine, or datacenter license to cover all VMs running on that single host. You should be looking at DPM/SCOM/SCCM as well to see if the whole package is worth the VERY high cost. If you aren't going to use all of it, it most likely isn't. SCVMM is only for managing hyperV Hosts and their VMs.

We use all of them except SCVMM, mainly because we only had a few hosts at a single datacenter. Now that we have spread across multiple DCs and have expanded our number of hosts/VMs, I will be researching it as well soon. It makes managing hyperV hosts much easier than using the MMC. It also allows you to have template VMs that can be deployed on the fly (and integrated with TFS/Test studio for development).
 
We use SCVMM, i'll tell you right now I have to use Failver cluster manager on the actual host to do a lot of managment.

SCVMM produces random stupid errors or just never refreshes, has ghost VM's that don't actually exist and the way it mounts an ISO is just plain dumb. It copies the ISO to the VM storage folder, then mounts it.

I can make some tasks easier but at the same time, its a pain in other ways.
 
1006 said:
Basically I am making a study to see if we should go for SCVMM 2012. Can someone mention the best ways or maybe scenarios SCVMM can be used to automate and simplify work for IT Admins.
Click to expand...

My advice to you is to get with your consultant and have a bake off (vendor briefs) between different management tools available. Yes, you'll have to pay them a day worth of time (less than 2k) but at the end of that day you'll have a much better understanding of what's what.

The benefit of having vendors come in and demo the solution for you is that you can get it from the horse's mouth and you can ask pointed questions.
 
Thuleman said:
My advice to you is to get with your consultant and have a bake off (vendor briefs) between different management tools available. Yes, you'll have to pay them a day worth of time (less than 2k) but at the end of that day you'll have a much better understanding of what's what.

The benefit of having vendors come in and demo the solution for you is that you can get it from the horse's mouth and you can ask pointed questions.
Click to expand...


Except most demo's are done by sales, who will say/do anything to close the deal. Demo's are typically staged and running on higher performance equipment so it looks faster than it really is. They'll skip over any buggy/unfinished sections, and tell you everything works great and is completely secure. So take what they say with a grain of salt.
 
Biznatch said:
Except most demo's are done by sales, who will say/do anything to close the deal. Demo's are typically staged and running on higher performance equipment so it looks faster than it really is. They'll skip over any buggy/unfinished sections, and tell you everything works great and is completely secure. So take what they say with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...

+1!
 
Thanks for your replies!

I'm looking more into how SCVMM can consolidate and delegate data centre resources and other things that can facilitate and reduce the load from IT admins.

Agreed with the above sales ppl have to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Any opinions please?
 
SCVMM is a Private Cloud enabler and management studio. It doesn't add many more features to Hyper-V itself, the big one being Dynamic Optimization so it will balance your VMs across hosts.

If you don't plan on creating a self service portal for your users, using Azure, creating an automated Private Cloud, or any of the other products in the System Center bundle, then don't bother.
 
Thanks guys! Does cluster aware updating only update physical hosts or does it also install updates on vms?
 
So I take it you can integrate WSUS with SCVMM to update VMs? doesn't this make cluster aware kinda useless? All you will be gaining is saving the migration process of vms to another host?:(
 
Scvmm cluster aware updating is for hosts only. Your guests are handled via other means.
It also does compliance policies on updates, and remidates all the hosts automatically.
I use a wsus instance on my vmm server just for my hosts and a dedicated wsus server for my guests.
You can setup vmm to share the iso to the guest without copying it to the host.
 
Just wanted to post a few other items on this subject.

With Cloud Theory in mind SCVMM does allow for separation of resources such as volumes, VM's, and the like. Along with that ability it allows fairly easy management of assigning permissions to specific groups for those resources. It's possible to even restrict what groups can perform what tasks, though at the lower levels you really need to be using AZMan or already have the scripts generated.
It will help with load balancing systems to ensure servers are not over tasked. Theoretically combined with Orchestrator, SCCM, Service Manager, and SCOM you can automate backups, reaction to events, setup a cloud front end like Azure (even extending your environment to Azure) and much more.
That said all these bells and whistles will take some setting up to get going. If you know what you want to accomplish there are many a consultants that will assist in short order. If you are standardized on Hyper-V then it's definitely the way to go.

If you have Horizon View for your VMWare environment already you can automate some tasks on your Hyper-V environment and visa versa with SCVMM. The two can even assist with migration between platforms.

If your environment isn't too complex and you are just running a bunch of back end servers that need to be available I agree with just using the Cluster Manager. Except for automation of deployments it can do most of the work and has less quirks.
 
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