A Full Introduction to VMM (Virtual Machine Manager)

Once you have selected the correct application, you must manage it. The traditional method of sliding the installation CD into the server’s CD/DVD drive is not a good practice for virtualized environments.

To take full advantage of the rapid server build and process migration capabilities inherent in Microsoft’s virtualization strategy, you need to manage your VMs and hardware resources from a central console. Use the server manager to manage the VM environment out of the box.

However, as the complexity of your virtualized environment increases, management becomes more challenging. It is the responsibility of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to manage more complex VM and host environments.

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What Is VMM

What is VMM? VMM is the abbreviation of Virtual Machine Manager. VMM is part of the System Center suite, used to configure, manage, and transform traditional data centers, and help provide a unified management experience across local, service providers, and Azure cloud.

Functions of VMM

This part is about the functions of VMM.

Data Center: Configure and manage data center components as a single structure in VMM. Datacenter components include virtualized servers, network components, and storage resources. VMM provides and manages the resources required to create virtual machines and services and deploy them to the private cloud.

Virtualization host: VMM can add, configure and manage Hyper-V and VMware virtualization hosts and clusters.

Network: Add network resources to the VMM structure, including network sites defined by IP subnets, virtual LANs (VLANs), logical switches, static IP addresses, and MAC pools. VMM provides network virtualization, including support for the creation and management of virtual networks and network gateways.

Network virtualization allows multiple tenants to have isolated networks and their IP address ranges to improve privacy and security. Using gateways, VMs on a virtual network can connect to physical networks at the same site or different locations.

Storage: VMM can discover, classify, supply, allocate and allocate local and remote storage. VMM supports block storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Storage Area Network (SAN)).

Library resources: The VMM structure retains a file-based and non-file-based resource library for creating and deploying VMs and services on virtualized hosts. File-based resources include virtual hard disks, ISO images, and scripts. Non-file-based resources include templates and configuration files used to standardize VM creation. Library resources are accessed through library sharing.

Requirements of Deploying VMM

If you want to deploy VMM, you should verify the following system requirements:

VMM Management Server: Verify the hardware and operating system requirements.

SQL Server: View supported SQL Server versions

VMM console: Check the operating system requirements and whether you want to run the VMM console on a separate computer.

VMM library: View the hardware requirements for remote VMM library sharing.

Virtualization host: View the operating systems supported by Hyper-V and SOFS servers in the VMM structure. Review the requirements of the VMware server.

Other architecture servers: View the operating systems supported by the update and PXE (for bare metal deployment) servers.

Notes for VMM

The following are some notes for VMM.

• You cannot run the VMM management server on the Nano server (applicable to versions prior to 2019).
• The management server computer name cannot exceed 15 characters.
• Do not install System Center components other than the VMM management server or agent on a server running Hyper-V.
• You can install the VMM management server on the VM. If you do this and use the dynamic memory feature of Hyper-V, you must set the boot RAM of the virtual machine to at least 2,048 megabytes (MB).
• If you want to manage more than 150 hosts, we recommend that you use the dedicated computer of the VMM management server and do the following:
• Add one or more remote computers as the library server, and do not use the default library share on the VMM management server.
• Do not run an instance of SQL Server on the VMM management server.
• For high availability, you can install the VMM management server on the failover cluster.