VMware vCenter Server 5.1 will soon support Microsoft Hyper-V servers

VMware may be in a hypervisor war with Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, but it also finds itself in a battle over virtualization management control. Third-party vendors have been evolving their management technologies for years, often out-navigating and out-innovating VMware. While VMware ostensibly welcomes management products from ecosystem partners like SolarWinds, Veeam, VKernel (now part of Dell), VMTurbo and Zenoss, it is still very much a frenemy situation.

Though third-party companies in VMware’s ecosystem are coming out with fantastic management products, the majority of virtual administrators simply do not want to give up using their vCenter clients. At the same time, they need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability, which often means managing with multiple panes of glass in their environment. One of the main marketing mantras these other management vendors all share (which VMware does not) is the idea of heterogeneous virtualization management.

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Since its beginnings, VMware has downplayed other virtualization platforms, never really acknowledging them as a significant threat. But with more and more organizations creating mixed-mode hypervisor data center environments, the need for a cross-platform management product becomes more important. In July 2011, VMware engineers began experimenting with heterogeneous virtualization management within vCenter, and one year later, with the acquisition of DynamicOps, the company showed signs of moving toward managing and interacting with other hypervisor technologies from within its own interfaces. By doing so, VMware seemed to be slowly legitimizing the competition.

During VMworld Europe 2012, VMware announced that vCenter Server 5.1 would soon be capable of managing Microsoft Hyper-V servers. The new add-on to vCenter Server that allows this functionality is something called vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager (MHM).

Up until now, management of Hyper-V servers by VMware software was limited to using one of VMware’s free but unsupported plug-ins that was cooked up in a laboratory by VMware engineers –- that’s the freebie dubbed as a fling. This particular fling, called vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, was described as providing “basic virtualization management capabilities for non-vSphere hypervisor platforms towards enabling centralized visibility and control across heterogeneous virtual infrastructures.” In other words, users could manage competitor hypervisor platforms and their virtual machines from within a VMware vSphere Client.

Keep that description in mind, because it’s going to sound awfully familiar. In many ways, it sounds like this fling has grown up to become a full-fledged product, leaving its experimental brothers and sisters behind in the VMware lab.

But unlike its lab-created predecessor, vCenter Multi Hypervisor Manager is far from experimental. In fact, it is an officially supported, production-ready vCenter Server 5.1 feature that will be a separate installable package and delivered as a C# VI Client plug-in.

The new software is made up of three components: a new MHM Extension into vCenter, an MHM Server that talks to the Hyper-V or third-party host infrastructure (actually translating the language of third-party hypervisors so that vCenter Server can understand it and manage it from the same user interface), and a vSphere Client MHM client plug-in that visualizes these third-party components into the infrastructure client.

It’s also important to note that this new MHM plug-in does not offer the full functionality of vSphere vCenter Server management to Microsoft Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines. In reality, the current 1.0 set of operations is very basic; but fortunately, it supports the more commonly used day-to-day management functions needed by most virtualization administrators. For example, it currently offers the ability to do the following:

• Add, remove, connect, and disconnect Hyper-V host servers to the vCenter inventory
• Provide a configuration summary view of Hyper-V hosts (processor, memory, and network)
• Create and delete new virtual machines on Hyper-V hosts
• Provide a remote console connection into Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines
• Enable simple power operations on Hyper-V hosts
• Enable power operations on Hyper-V virtual machines as well as guest operating systems running within them (power off, power on, suspend, shut down the guest and reset)
• Allow modification of virtual hardware settings associated with non-vSphere virtual machines (such as changing the amount of memory or the number of vCPUs, or adding/removing a floppy drive, CD drive, hard drive, or network adapter)
• Display tasks initiated on and events associated with Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines within the general tasks and events pane
• Allow vCenter integrated authorization

With its first pass, VMware said it would start out with support for the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. But because the architecture it has created is modular, the company said it should be able to add support for other hypervisors pretty easily down the road.

Right now, MHM 1.0 currently supports Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hosts, and Hyper-V Server 2012 support will be added when available.

VMware said the new client plug-in would be available sometime in the third quarter, so we should expect a release anytime now. Once completed, it will be made available for download on the VMware vCenter Server download page at no additional cost to owners of vCenter Server Standard edition and higher.

You ever hear the phrase, “When pigs fly”? Well, it’s time to look up because pigs are definitely flying!

This article, “VMware vCenter Server 5.1 will soon support Microsoft Hyper-V servers,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.