quite complex

[Wes]

I still think of VMware or IBM when I ponder virtual machines. Those companies pioneered much of the early work (especially IBM!) on the subject. But Microsoft is a formidable and determined competitor and should not be underestimated by anyone. Cardoso demonstrates this with the considerable amount of detail on the capabilities of Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Enumerating the components gives an indication - the console, management server, database [running Microsoft SQL Server] [are you surprised ? ], VMM library, self service portal, command shell.

The basic motivation for using VMM 2012 is to ease the management of a cluster of virtual machines. Microsoft anticipates, and I am sure correctly, that the next step for an adminstrator of a few virtual machines is a need to easily scale up the number of these. Without the total management effort being proportional to the number of VMs. Much of the book's exposition can be understood as flowing from this desire.

But I do think Microsoft could have done more to simplify matters. The installation of SCVMM 2012 takes an entire and non-trivial chapter. And you are not done with the installation. There is the not so small matter of installing the management server. This takes another chapter. Strewth !

All this is before the myriad configuration and deployment steps later in the book.

Then there is the common need to deal with legacy earlier versions. One chapter delves into upgrading from SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1. This means revision 2, service pack 1. But maybe it still seems like gibberish. Alas, if you deal with Microsoft products, the complexity never seems to decrease.

Not that I blame the author of this book. He is accurately reporting on what you need to understand for VMM 2012.

But if you can get all the way to chapter 8, then that should be worth the slog. It discusses how VMM handles other vendors' VMs. Nicely, VMM is compatible with hypervisors from Citrix and VMware. We are encouraged to abstract the hypervisor layer, as you can now do common tasks in heterogeneous environments. A necessary reflection of the reality in many data centers where those vendors are already present.