Hello friends

This is a new article series about SCVMM 2012 Beta product. In the final release, probably new features will be added and will be slightly different from this Beta version but I think that final release will be more-or-less the same with Beta. Therefore, I write an article series about the product in Beta version. Hopefully when the final release will be on the market, I will compare the differences.

As you already know, SCVMM is the product that we manage our virtualization environment. In this series, I will talk about the new features/talents that 2012 version has over earlier version of SCVMM. I will also show you how to install the product on a single server. Then I will play with the administrator console.  New terminologies, cloud and services, are presented with this release. Therefore I will talk about the cloud and services also.

There are new features SCVMM 2012 Beta offers to customers over earlier versions. Some of them are:

-          Run As accounts and Run As Profiles: This is a new security feature and we can provide necessary credentials for performing operations in VMM 2012.

-          Support for Citrix XenServer as a virtual machine host

-          Private Cloud: Combination of hosts, networking, storage and library resources together

-          Service: Set of virtual machines that are configured and deployed together and are managed as a single entity. For example, a deployment of a multi-tier line of business application.

You can find a more detailed list in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg671825.aspx .

As the previous version of SCVMM, SCVMM 2012 Beta has few components. These are VMM Management Server, VMM Console, Database Server, Library Share server and VMM Self-Service Portal Server (Optional). They can either be installed on different hardware separately or can be installed on a single machine. This depends on your virtualization environment. If you have lots of physical virtual host machines to manage, you will prefer the separation. Anyway, for installation of SCVMM 2012 Beta there are some hardware and software requirements. In the next part of the article series, I will explain the installation of product on a single server therefore I summarize a single server requirements in Table 1. For a detailed list of each components requirements, you can look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610592.aspx .

Table 1: System Requirements of SCVMM 2012 Beta on a single machine

As I wrote before, SCVMM 2012 now also supports Citrix XenServer. Table 2 summarizes which virtualization platforms can be managed by SCVMM 2012 Beta. This can be changed by final release because as you already know, in a short time VMware releases its new platform vSphere 5.

Table 2: Supported virtualization platforms by SCVMM 2012 Beta

Note 1: VMM 2012 does not support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 as a virtual machine host.

Note 2: Installing the VMM Self-Service Portal on a domain controller is not supported

OK. These are the things you have to know for now. Before starting to the setup process, I have to install Microsoft SQL Server on the server (which has to be case-insensitive). The detailed explanation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 installation can be found at http://www.ipsure.com/blog/2010/step-by-step-installation-of-sharepoint-server-2007-on-windows-server-2008-r2-and-ms-sql-2008-2/. Just go to this link and finalize your Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 installation then continue with the second part of this article series.

This is the end of Part 1. I will continue with the installation of SCVMM 2012 Beta on the next article. See you then. Bye for now.

Related Posts

1. Step by step guide for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta – 02
2. Step by Step Guide for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta – 03
3. Step by Step Guide for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta – 05