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Gold : Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

“The right systems management tool can save time, streamline operations, and help administrators proactively address potential issues before they become critical problems. An effective systems management tool is as critical to a data center as any server or air conditioning system – especially for larger data centers with high levels of workload consolidation.

For the purposes of this year’s awards, systems management products include any systems management appliances and software products designed to measure, benchmark, report, provision, plan and control servers and other data center devices. Entrants may include any systems management point products up through major management frameworks

The single pane of glass is the dream of all systems operations managers – to be able to effectively manage their entire environments through a single screen. The dream may not yet be fully realized, but as part of the System Center Suite of management tools, Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 SP1, is close enough to deserve the Gold Product of the Year award in systems management for 2011.

But what really makes SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 shine is that Microsoft decided to seamlessly integrate with other virtualization products and vendors. In addition to Hyper-V, SCVMM provides compatibility with VMware VI3 through Virtual Center integration. SCVMM supports VMware-specific features, such as VMotion, while also providing SCVMM-specific features like Intelligent Placement to VMware servers. It also provides a process that converts VMware VMs to virtual hard disks through the virtual to virtual (V2V) transfer process. There is also a very user-friendly self-service portal, which is compatible with multiple third party vendors and tools.

Microsoft has made some very significant strides with this latest release of SCVMM. The company is also freely admitting that there are actually other virtualization solutions out there, and that some of them are good (a hard pill to swallow for Microsoft). Their efforts to integrate with other system management products and tools make the newest version of SCVMM the realization of the single pane of glass dream come that much closer, and worthy of evaluation by data center managers. ”

Source: http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/guide/SearchDataCenter-Products-of-the-Year-Systems-Management-winners-2011