VMM2008 Released

I now got around to upgrading the Beta of Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to the RTM version. MS have made quite a few changes....improvments.... and introduced one or two bugs (see my next post).

The splash screen for VMM Admin Console has changed significantly, and previous bugs which existed in relation to the storage of ISO's in a VMM Library have been corrected.

The porcess of Physical To Virtual Conversion on Windows 2000 machines has been introduced. More specifically Microsoft have enabled a feature called Offline Conversion. This basically installs a Windows PE images onto the source, boots it up into Windows PE to do the conversion, then creates it as a VM..... works a charm, although in testing we experienced downtime of around 1 hour as it was an old PC.

Another thing MS have fixed significantly is the web portal, which no longer takes 20 minutes to log in to. You can now give users the ability to create their own BLANK VMs, something which wasnt possible in the Beta, but will be ideal in a classroom scenario.

If you are upgrading from VMM2008 Beta to live, a word of warning. The agent on all your hosts will also require upgrading. This was very smooth for our test 2003 host, but became extreamly complex for a server 2008 hyper-v host. To cut a long story short... we had to manually remove the VMM agent from the host, uninstall hyper V, upgrade to the latest version of Hyper-v, then re-install the VMM agent. It worked, but there was a period of panic when we lost control, and ability to control any of the VMs on the HyperV host.

All in all this release is looking really good, and offers the obvious advantage of well supported management of Server 2008 HyperV Hosts. Sadly still no support from USB devices on a host/server (dongles etc), and no support for non domain member servers.....but you cant have it all.