News

Evaluation Version of VMM 2008 R2 Released

The new release will be able to work with competitor VMware's virtualization product.

• By Kurt Mackie
• September 21, 2009

Microsoft in August released a 180-day evaluation version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM 2008 R2). The product has reached the released to manufacturing (RTM) milestone and will be generally available on the first of this month for volume-licensing customers.

Microsoft has been testing VMM 2008 R2 in conjunction with Windows Server 2008 R2, according to a blog by Rakesh Malhotra, a Microsoft group program manager. Microsoft released the RTM version of Windows Server 2008 R2 in July and made it available to TechNet subscribers, Microsoft Developer Network subscribers and volume-licensing customers earlier in August.

According to the product's description, VMM 2008 R2 works with Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Standard.

VMM 2008 R2 also works with competitor VMware Inc.'s virtualization product. Microsoft's Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog states that: "One key additional feature of VMM [20]08 R2 is the ability to manage VMs running on VMware vSphere 4.0."

New in the R2 version of VMM 2008 R2 are storage migration, live migration queuing, rapid provisioning, host-compatibility checks, support for third-party clustered file systems and support for the Veritas Volume Manager.