Appendix A. SCVMM 2012 New Features and Enhancements

Before the release of Microsoft System Center 2012, the previous product suite provided great features for building datacenter dynamics, and helped organizations to automate most of their routine tasks. But still there were a few gaps when it came to the private cloud and managed services. The Microsoft System Center 2012 suite addressed those gaps, which were identified by the industry in the earlier version of the product, and provided great features for datacenter management and building the private cloud on the customers' terms.

SCVMM 2012 in particular is a one-stop shop for all the datacenter and virtualized stack management requirements, where it starts management from the bare-metal deployment of the hypervisor (Hyper-V) to the datacenter optimization. SCVMM works great when it is integrated with the other System Center 2012 suite of products, for better management and automation. Now let's go ahead and understand the new capabilities and enhancements made in SCVMM 2012.

We can summarize the new features and core enhancements in SCVMM 2012 in four major areas, and we will also dig into each of these four areas to understand what new features and enhancements have been made in it.

The following are the new features and enhancements made in SCVMM 2012; let's discover each of them, one by one:

Hypervisor infrastructure management
HA VMM server	VMM 2012 can be set up as a highly available system with Microsoft Cluster Service. With this new feature in place, organizations can now take full advantage of building highly available SCVMM infrastructures for the management and provisioning of their virtualization platform and private cloud.
Custom properties	VMM has a new feature of custom properties, where an administrator can set custom properties for a given feature; and by means of custom properties, applying and using a specific feature becomes more handy and relevant.
PowerShell	System Center 2012 and all other products are tightly integrated with PowerShell, where all the functions and functionalities you perform within the GUI can be scripted with PowerShell, which provides a great level of flexibility to administrators to script their routine and bulk modifications to their virtualized infrastructure.
Fabric management
Hyper-V bare-metal provisioning	VMM 2012 allows administrators to perform bare-metal deployment right from SCVMM; whereas in the early version of the product, administrators had to first deploy the OS, then patch the server, and then add the host to the VMM infrastructure. But now you can deploy the operating system right from the VMM itself, and when your system meets all the requirements of your infrastructure, your host will automatically be added to the VMM environment.
Extended support for all major hypervisors	Along with Hyper-V and VMware, now Citrix XenServer also comes under the list of VMM-supported hypervisors. Organizations with a heterogeneous environment can deploy SCVMM, and can manage all these different types of hypervisors in the same way. SCVMM makes it much easier to manage your hypervisors, no matter what vendor you are using and what type of guest virtual machine you are running on them; you can get all the functionalities and features for managing an enterprise-class server virtualization and a cloud environment.
Network management	As we said, SC 2012 SP1 and VMM 2012 SP1 are cloud-focused tools, where network management functionality has been greatly overhauled along with numerous new features and enhancements added into the network management account. VMM 2012 supports hardware load balancing, VIP profiles, VLAN tagging, static IP pools, and MAC address pools for the virtual machines.
Storage management	Just like network management, storage management can be now done inside VMM 2012 SP1. We can manage the storage LUN management-related activities within SCVMM, which offloads the storage admin part. A storage pool can be attached to VMM, and from there, as per the needs of your virtualized environment, you can allocate and use it wherever you find it necessary.
Update management	Patching up a standalone server has never been so difficult, but patching a Hyper-V cluster node was an immensely difficult task because before you patch up and restart the node, you have to migrate the guest virtual machine to another Hyper-V server. VMM 2012 addressed the cluster Hyper-V nodes, and now VMM 2012 update management is an integrated functionality where VMM now orchestrates the patch management, and allows you to set up baselines to automatically perform the patch management of the host, wherever and whenever it is needed.
Dynamic optimization	According to your need and configuration, VMM 2012 now performs a great level of dynamic optimization of the workload. The scale-in and scale-out features of VMM 2012 for a service deployment group of homogeneous guest VMs can be monitored with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and at any point in time, optimization of your physical resources can be achieved with a great level of automation.
Power management	With the dynamic optimization and services' deployment within VMM 2012, a great level of power optimization can be achieved, where VMM can turn off an under-utilized host and save power when the load is low; and as per the administrator settings of the scale-in and scale-out features, when VMM sees there is not much load for the service, it may turn off a unnecessary guest, and thus also turn off an under-utilized host to save power.
Cluster management	As we said, VMM 2012 SP1 supports bare-metal deployment, which means that now a new server box gets the OS and patches installed through VMM. It is also possible to add the same box or a number of boxes in the form of a cluster. This new feature of VMM allows organizations to install the operating system.
Cloud management
Application owner usage	SCVMM enables the self-service usage for an application administrator to author and deploy, manage, and decommission applications in the private cloud.
Capacity and capability	SCVMM provides a great level of control on the capacity and the capability of the cloud rollout within small to large cloud implementations, where controlling the capacity and capability of the individual cloud user and cloud itself is the most important aspect from the service delivery viewpoint. VMM provides capacity- and capability-throttling features for the administrators, so they can set policies and settings on the cloud and the user level to restrict them to use the physical and cloud resources at a certain level.
Delegation and quota	In addition to the capability and the capacity profiles and controlling policies, VMM provides a delegation of rights and quota settings, which apply to both the cloud and the user role, where an extended level of delegation of rights makes it much easier for you to control what level of privileges you want to grant to a user, a department, or an organization for authoring, deploying, and managing cloud resources. Quota is another administrative control available in VMM. Quota can be applied to the usability of different levels of the cloud and physical resources.
Services management
Service template	Service templates are just same as the virtual machine template. The customization available for service templates allows an administrator to tailor different role-based templates, where integration with other SC 2012 suite products and components makes it more useful for service implementation on the fly with a great level of dynamics and automation.
Application deployment	With all the dynamics and automation, SCVMM 2012 allows organizations to deploy an application as a single instance or as a service. Application deployment usually refers to a tier-based implementation of x number of servers, consisting of frontend tier, middle tier, and the backend tier. In particular, application deployment within SCVMM 2012 refers to the ability to deploy Microsoft SQL Server as a part of the application deployment. SCVMM allows an administrator to deploy SQL Server as an application, and the IIS application as a virtual machine and service. The VMM service deployment feature allows organizations to tailor their service deployment within SCVMM, where this service deployment can also be set as a template; so whenever it is needed, it can be deployed with a few clicks.
Custom command execution	While you deploy a service or virtual machine, you have the luxury to execute a particular program or command at any point of time during the deployment and service provisioning.
Image-based servicing	This is another great feature of VMM 2012, where an administrator can also deploy the virtual instances with a preconfigured image. Image-based servicing also helps organizations when it comes to deploying a complex three-tier-based application, in which complex integration and customized application servicing is needed.