For those of you who have not heard yet, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 was RTM a few days ago.
One thing I noticed on a post on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog was a reference to some of the details that are in the upcoming release (granted this is for the RC and I cannot attest to this being the same for the RTM version) and found these little points of interest.
- I wonder where Microsoft got this "need" from? Perhaps because it is a feature that has been around in ESX 3.5 since January 2008?
- Downtime of less than 2 minutes? (need I say more?)
- True by default you can only perform 2 simultaneous vmotions, but this is not a hard limit and can be changed - you can see a good review of the her from Simon Long and Jason Boche in this post.
I dread to even think if this is true - how long it will take to evacuate a Hyper-V host if they have to be done one by one. At least now you don't have wait for each one to finish before starting the other - Thanks Microsoft for fixing that one! - For full disclosure - granted Storage vMotion is now only available in the Enterprise Plus version of vSphere (which is not something I am very pleased about) and Microsoft claims that this is completely free (I have yet to confirm this)
On a personal note a small message to Microsoft (and their supporters).
Dear Microsoft,
You have come a long way since Hyper-V version 1. Hyper-V R2 is a great product. I personally use both - and will continue to do so. Each one has their use-cases and their appropriate time and place to be used.
There are a number of features that you still have a lot of catching up to do to get to where VMware is today, but I gather you will get there.
The competition is healthy, and welcomed and me as the customer will benefit from it without a doubt.
I personally have a favorite - but that does not mean that I will not continue to explore new and emerging technologies, be it VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or KVM
Hope you enjoyed the ride!