System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) forms part of Microsoft's System Center line of virtual machine management and reporting tools, alongside previously established tools such as System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager. SCVMM is designed for management of large numbers of Virtual Servers based on Microsoft Virtual Server and Hyper-V, and was released for enterprise customers in October 2007. A standalone version for small and medium business customers is available.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables increased physical server utilization by making possible simple and fast consolidation on virtual infrastructure. This is supported by consolidation candidate identification, fast Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration and intelligent workload placement based on performance data and user defined business policies (NOTE: P2V Migration capability was removed in SCVMM 2012r2). VMM enables rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator and end users using a self-service provisioning tool. Finally, VMM provides the central management console to manage all the building blocks of a virtualized data center.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 was released in 2010, which added live migration and other new features.

The latest release is System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager, which was released in November 2013. This product enables the creation and management of private clouds made up from Hyper-V, VMware and Xen virtualization hosts.

SCVMM 2012 SP1 provides the framework to import add-ins created by external vendors, so that vendors can provide their product specific features and details. HP Storage Management Add-ins is one of the free add-ins available from Hewlett-Packard Storage to provide context sensitive information on storage arrays.