Five signs SCVMM isn't right for your data center

Today, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is widely regarded by the data center industry as one of the leading Hyper-V management platforms on the market. But in fact, it is not necessarily suitable for all enterprise data centers. It is believed to be able to help current IT enterprise organizations take full advantage of the advantages brought by virtualization technology, but is it really the case?

Although virtualization technology can help current enterprise organizations reduce resource costs, reduce downtime, and simplify system management and maintenance, why have most IT enterprise organizations not adopted this technology so far? Because using the wrong management platform may greatly weaken the most valuable benefits that enterprise deployment and implementation of virtualization technology can bring.

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In this article, we will help our readers understand:

• The five challenges facing SCVMM are limiting the benefits of virtualization technology deployment in IT organizations.
• Advanced management capabilities that IT organizations should look for in another Hyper-V management tool.

Today's IT organization's decision to modernize its data center by adopting a strategy that leverages virtualization is likely to indicate the following:

• The adoption of virtualization technology will help your company reduce corresponding resource costs.
• Virtualization technology will help your company greatly reduce the risk of downtime.
• The adoption of virtualization technology will help enterprise organizations simplify system management and maintenance.

The purpose of enterprises deploying virtualization technology is to save the company time and money and solve the corresponding headaches in data center operation and management.

Although virtualization technology can indeed help current IT enterprise organizations deliver on the above promises, why have most IT enterprise organizations not actively adopted this technology so far? Because if the wrong management platform is used, it is possible to eliminate the benefits brought by virtualization deployment and implementation, and even make the management process of the enterprise data center very time-consuming, resource-intensive, and inefficient.

With this in mind, now is the time for organizations to demand more from their virtualization management platforms. Is your platform making the most of your cloud resources? Does it provide a cost-effective experience that helps simplify and centralize management? If your organization currently uses Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), the answers to all of these questions may further confirm your suspicions:

While SCVMM is considered one of the leading Hyper-V management platforms on the market today and is designed to save your business time, money and operational headaches, the reality is that for IT organizations that demand more from their virtualized data centers, the deployment of virtual technology does have its shortcomings.

As a SCVMM user, if your company has one or more of the following challenges, we recommend that you consider re-evaluating your company's virtualization management toolset.

5 reasons why your enterprise virtualization deployments are not being fully utilized

1. Enterprises must use multiple tools to perform basic management functions.

Think back to how many times you've had to access additional tools to perform certain functions critical to virtual machine (VM) management, backup, security and monitoring. Or, if you've been using SCVMM, think about how many times in a day you've had to jump from one tool to another to complete a task.

Take cluster management, for example. Failover clusters are essential for maintaining high availability of applications and services, but the ability to manage them is not a native feature of SCVMM. That’s why you have to access Failover Cluster Manager to properly create and maintain failover clusters. If you’ve used this tool, you’ve probably spent a lot of time migrating between the SCVMM console and the Failover Cluster Manager console because no one had everything they needed to get the job done. Not only did you waste time constantly switching from one tool to another, you also wasted money.

How virtualization management can be better:

Managing your virtual data center shouldn’t be an expensive or time-consuming task. In fact, your team can get more done in less time, no matter which tools you use. Unify all your virtual resources, so there’s no need to download other solutions or switch between consoles or master multiple GUIs every day.

Using a unified cloud management tool will help enable IT virtualization management staff in your enterprise data center to:

• Manage virtual resources in your enterprise data center, including control over users and tenant access.
• Manage virtual resources in an enterprise data center, including the ability to centrally configure, manage, and migrate virtual machines across the entire infrastructure.
• Monitor virtual resources and receive alerts on virtual machine performance. Recover virtual resources in your enterprise data center by performing backup and replication.

2. Your business spends more time resolving problems rather than preventing them from happening in the first place.

With SCVMM, it's difficult for data center operations managers to identify potential performance issues before they occur, which can cost your company a lot of time to process resources. For example, there's no way to get a comprehensive performance overview of all your virtual machines in a single dashboard, which makes it a challenge to gather information about an impending database crash or a drive that's running out of space. Even if you try to expand SCVMM's monitoring capabilities by adding System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), the visibility of your virtual environment will increase accordingly, but the number of consoles your company uses will also increase accordingly.

Finally, the complex and time-consuming monitoring process has become a problem that many enterprise IT departments choose to avoid. Instead, they need a valuable tool to help them solve practical operational management problems.

How virtualization management can be better:

Proactive problem repair is critical for most organizations that need to ensure 99.99% availability. In order to protect your data center operations with minimal time and effort, you will need to deploy a set of management tools to do the following:

By using a unified cloud management tool, IT virtualization management staff in your enterprise data center should be able to:

• Provides a unified view of all hosts and virtual machines in an enterprise datacenter in real time from a single console.
• Allows you to customize email alerts to alert you to potential issues before they impact your business operations.
• Groups multiple related resources into a single set of views, providing you with quick and easy access to specific environments.
• By applying linear regression techniques to past performance data analysis, including CPU, memory, disk and network usage, it can help your enterprise data center predict future performance.

3. Your business is struggling to deliver the best performance with the least expense.

In theory, your data center virtualization solution is designed to reduce costs while optimizing resource utilization. But whether the solution's implementation helps improve these areas depends on proper load balancing of tasks within the virtual machines. Underloaded or overloaded machines will eventually affect application performance, and if your company is unaware of this load imbalance until performance is affected, it will be more difficult to resolve the problem.

SCVMM makes it difficult to implement cost-effective optimization. First, there are no built-in optimization tools, which means that proper load balancing requires additional downloads and configuration. Second, many settings in SCVMM do not appear in the main management console, which means that your data center will need to spend extra time documenting where they are located in order to find them. The end result: important things are likely to be overlooked.

How virtualization management can be better:

The use of appropriate management tools can help avoid or minimize the cost of purchasing new servers, while also helping to improve system performance and uptime, leading to a better user experience. This is why the solution chosen for your enterprise data center should be equipped with dynamic optimization tools, such as continuous analysis of virtualized data center environments and automated workload optimization. In addition, solutions that provide a simple way to track workloads at any time mean that your data center management and operations staff can devote more work to analyzing these trends and improving future load balancing. Your data center should also ensure that you can observe the data center's load balancing process in real time by receiving emails on any device, and immediately be informed of any unplanned virtual machine or storage migration status.

4. Loss of past historical data in your enterprise data center due to insufficient backup and recovery.

Managing outages without losing data is a critical part of your data center operations manager's job, but SCVMM lacks native backup and recovery capabilities. Some SCVMM users back up data by creating and applying checkpoints, which save the entire configuration of a virtual machine, allowing administrators to revert to that configuration if needed. This strategy works great for backing up files, but not so great for databases because no replication actually occurs. (Replication is a key component of actual backups.)

Additionally, there is a good chance that changes will be made to the database between the time the checkpoint is applied and the time when downtime may occur, so all the intermediate data added will be lost. Checkpoints are a limited solution at best, requiring your IT staff to spend extra time and use a disproportionate amount of disk space for storage. If you want more advanced backup tools, you need to download another tool: System Center Data Protection Manager.

How virtualization management can be better:

To maintain business continuity for your organization and its customers, your data center will need a virtualization management solution you can trust. The system you choose should:

• Allows you to back up entire Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure.
• Enable full, incremental, or scheduled backups to help save disk space.
• Protect your business data by using AES 256-bit encryption.
• Replicate critical Hyper-V workloads to a secondary location or replica site on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis.

5. The time your enterprise data center spends on cloud management tasks far exceeds the time you spend improving performance and strengthening backup and recovery strategies.

Many IT professionals switch to SCVMM because it is packaged with Microsoft's System Center, thinking it will meet their cloud management needs. However, it doesn't take long for the limitations to become clear:

• The initial configuration of SCVMM is too complex.
• SCVMM requires several additional tools to perform basic management tasks.
• These additional tools come with separate consoles and interfaces, which makes navigating through tasks like template creation a challenge.
• It lacks facilities to help your enterprise data center effectively manage the life cycle of virtual machines, including the creation, production, and retirement of virtual machines.

In the long run, SCVMM will require more human resources to manage cloud services.

How virtualization management can be better:

Whatever solution you choose to replace SCVMM with, it should include the following:

• It should be easy to deploy and use, and require minimal configuration.
• It should simplify the management of your entire virtual environment in your enterprise data center, giving you easy access to a variety of functions from a single console.
• It should have a clear, intuitive and consistent interface to pave the way for your data center management and operations staff to successfully complete various tasks.
• It should have the tools that make it easy for your data center managers to successfully monitor, implement, operate and maintain virtual machines. It should also include cost-effective tools that can create and migrate virtual machines, replicate, manage updates, create templates and monitor performance.
• It should be suitable for seamless expansion of complex environments, including enterprise organizations with multiple remote data centers, multi-domain environments, and multi-workgroups.

In short, the right virtualization management tool should have the relevant advanced management capabilities that your enterprise needs.