MSCM

We are happy to announce the formation of the System Center Virtual User Group, a user group dedicated to providing resources for education and collaboration between users of Microsoft System Center technologies everywhere! Thanks to all in the community and at Microsoft who have assisted in it’s formation and offered resources. Details on group launch date and where to find us at MMS 2008 below.

Future announcements and resources will be available online at http://www.systemcenterusergroup.com . Thanks to Maarten Goet of techlog.nl for his collaboration in starting the group and hosting the site!

This group is intended to function not only as a traditional user group holding periodic meetings (via Live Meeting in our case), but as a forum where users can come together to find resources in establishing their own traditional “physical” user groups.

Visit us at MMS 2008! For more information on how you can participate in the SCVUP, please visit us in the Community area or the Infront booth at the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 in Las Vegas, NV, scheduled to be held the week of April 28th, 2008. We’ll be podcasting, giving away SCUG t-shirts and holding a drawing for several prizes!

To receive future announcements: Click “Join” in the top right corner of this page and setup your free member account. Further details will be posted to the site and sent via e-mail to site members. You may also receive announcements subscribing to the RSS feed of the site weblog.

First Group Meeting is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, May 28th. A detailed agenda and meeting invitation will be e-mailed and posted in coming weeks.

The next release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (currently  dubbed “SCVMM vNext”) aims to consolidate management of virtual machines from multiple platforms and sources (VS 2005, VMware 3.x, and Xen in a future release). But to really win the war in the end, I believe MS needs to target the following key areas: 

1. DR / HA - MS currently has no true  VMotion equivalent today. Addressing disaster recovery scenarios is definitely a key area. Check out the High Availability with Hyper-V webcast.
2. Performance - By some estimates I’ve seen, VMware outperforms Virtual Server 2005 by 15-20%. We’ll see how far Windows 2008 cuts into that.
3. Make virtualization accessible for the mid-market - Virtualization has found it’s way into shops as small as 35 users amongst my clients, but the VMware mgmt interfaces (and let’s face it, virtualization concepts in general) are tough for IT generalists to grasp. Delivering a better mouse-trap to this market is critical for adoption.
4. Appliances - With the release of 3i, VMware enterered the world of plug-and-play virtualization with minimal user knowledge of necessary configuration items. This would no doubt ease deployment not only in mid-market, but branch office deployment in the enterprise space.

Read more about Microsoft’s plans for the next version of VMM HERE.