Network World weighs in on SCVMM-VI3 Management

Yesterday, Network World published this article: Microsoft’s SC-VMM provides limited view of VMware-based VMs.  I’ve quoted some of the best parts and followed each with some additional resources to reinforce the author’s points.

Using SC VMM to initially make a VM image instance wasn’t easy or intuitive.

Ahh, that sounds like this issue regarding VMware ESX provisioning defaults:

We didn’t want to copy the ISO image so we chose: ‘Share image file instead of copying it’. But when we did that we got an inarticulate error message…it was no mean feat to get the Library function to work.

One of the all-time VCritical favorites, also discussed here.

Every time we clicked inside to give focus to the viewer while installing a VM, it would pop up with the message, “You can’t control the mouse while running a remote session without virtual tools installed.” This was very annoying because when we installed a SLES VM onto a Hyper-V server, we couldn’t even use the mouse, and still had trouble using the VM afterwards trying to install the Hyper-V Linux components.

Another VCritical classic: Of Mice and Xen.

…we were not able to use templates created in ESX within the SC VMM interface. Therefore, it is still necessary to use VMware’s client for certain tasks, and we wondered why we would use SC VMM when we had to reference VMware’s utilities anyway.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to use ESX templates, don’t you know?  The author should be happy that he did not attempt to import his vCenter templates:

We had trouble configuring PRO tips. Integrating it with MOM and SC VMM was unreasonably difficult. We were able to get PRO tips working on a per-host basis and were eventually able to get VMs to report errors on a per VM basis, but only for Windows VMs, not for Linux ones.

See PRO Tips: Pros only, please.

We can’t recommend it for larger installations, and certainly not for those installations that have non-Windows VM guests.

Hyper-V has Linux support… in theory.  You don’t need to customize non-Windows VMs do you?

While I was writing this article, I noticed a tweet from Mike Laverick with his new post on vendor-neutral VM management — check it out.