SCVMM Fundamentals
Two common sayings that can be adapted to Hyper-V and SCVMM are “A poor
workman blames his tools” and “Behind every great man is a great woman” (maybe
that’s a song lyric). The tools that are used to manage and interact with Hyper-V are
critical to a successful virtualization endeavor. I would not blame an administrator for
blaming an inefficiently run Hyper-V implementation on his tools if all the
administrator had access to was the Hyper-V management tool supplied in the box;
thus, “A poor Hyper-V admin blames Hyper-V Manager, and so he should.” For
effective and comprehensive management of a Hyper-V environment and a
heterogeneous virtualization environment including ESXi, System Center Virtual
Machine Manager is a necessity. Thus “Behind every great Hyper-V implementation is
a great SCVMM.”
Major New Capabilities in SCVMM 2016
The new capabilities of SCVMM 2016 tightly align to the investment areas in Windows
Server 2016 and can be broken down into four key areas: Compute, Storage,
Networking, and Security.
COMPUTE
Full lifecycle management of Nano Server-based hosts and virtual machines
(VMs), including initial deployment of Nano to VMs and physical hosts and
managing Nano deployments.
Rolling Upgrade of a Windows Server 2012 R2 host cluster to Windows Server
2016 with no downtime for the hosted workloads
Configure bare metal machines as a Hyper-V host cluster in one step instead of
two.
Configure bare metal machines as additional nodes of an existing Scale-Out File
Server (SOFS) cluster without leaving VMM console.
Increase/decrease memory and add/remove virtual network adapter for a running
VM.
Take production checkpoints.
Note that Server App-V has been deprecated in SCVMM 2016 and is only available
for existing Service Templates upgraded from 2012 R2.STORAGE
Deploy and manage storage clusters with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) in dis-
aggregated or hyper-converged topology.
Synchronously replicate storage volumes using Storage Replica (SR) instead of