While it’s clear MS has a long journey to take the lead in the virtualization market, it’s interesting to see how System Center technologies can drive virtualization, often on the cheap. But with hyper V on the way, we’re going to see more Windows shops looking to consolidate servers on the new virtualization platform.

Operations Manager 2007 plays an obvious supporting role in monitoring VM hosts and guest operating systems. However, Operations Manager can play a key role in actually planning your organizations virtualization initiative.

Did you know you can order up Operations Manager 2007 virtualization reports from the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Administrator Console?

The reports are generated by Operations Manager 2007 monitoring, but can be ordered through the VMM Console. This makes it convenient for your virtualization gurus to analyze their piece of the infrastructure, even if they don’t know a thing about Operations Manager 2007.

This does require three things to make the magic happen:

1. You must import the Server Virtualization MP for Operations Manager 2007.

2. You must enable reports in SC Virtual Machine Manager.

3. The second item is that to see and order reports in SC Virtual Machine Manager, you must be a member of an Operations Manager Report Operator role

Available Reports:

The available virtualization reports through Opsmgr include these listed below.

• Virtualization Candidates report - Helps identify physical computers that are good candidates for conversion to virtual machines. The Virtualization Candidates report displays average values for a set of commonly requested performance counters for CPU, memory, and disk usage, along with hardware configuration, including processor speed, number of processors, and total RAM. You can limit the report to computers that meet specified CPU and RAM requirements, and you can sort the results by selected columns in the report.
• Virtual Machine Allocation report provides information you can use to calculate chargebacks to cost centers for virtual machines.
• Virtual Machine Utilization report provides information about your virtual machines. For the identified time, this report shows average usage and total or maximums for virtual machine processors, memory, and disk space.
• Host Utilization report shows the number of virtual machines running per host. For the identified time and host group, this report shows average usage and total or maximums for host processors, memory, and disk space.
• Host Utilization Growth report shows the percentage growth of host resources and number of virtual machines running for the identified time period.

What is this worth?

VMware partners (like EMC) actually offer a services package in which they collect data from your environment, which they then analyze and make recommendations. I’ve had some customers tell me they actually paid for this service.

The real value here is that System Center takes the planning process from a professional services engagement to an in-house activity.