I would like to thank the customers who have registered on VMM User Voice and providing votes and ideas. 

We've been busy reviewing VMM User Voice. In some of the ideas, we've been providing status and comments. If you have a chance, please look at these and respond back. It is essential for us to hear from you in detail. 

With that said, to provide more up to date information, we've created a section called VMM Team Announcement on User Voice.  Please check this!!!

Here is our first announcement on User Voice!!  

For the Update Rollup, we have 2 distinct features in flight. 

We are recruiting customers who can be part of developing these features.  If you are interested in any of these features, and have the environment to test and provide feedback, please do let us know. Time is of the essence and the capacity is 5 customers / feature at this time. 

Please contact: vmmtap@systemcentervmm.uservoice.com

Introduction:

This blog discusses the virtual machine (VM) deployment enhancements introduced in System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). (This information is focused on RTM features.)

Prior to this version, VMM exclusively used BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) to transfer VMs from VMM library to hosts for VM deployment. However with large environments using Hyper-V and VMM managing large number of VMs, deployment time is essential.

With VMM 2012 R2, we optimized the speed for VM deployment from VMM library by leveraging Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX).  Many large environments use SAN storage.  ODX is a feature introduced on Windows Server 2012 which automatically orchestrates and optimizes the use of SAN storage by using tokenization on reads and writes without using buffers.  With this capability, copying the VM can offloaded to the SAN device which decreases the server cpu utilization and decreases network bandwidth consumption which provides faster VM deployments. To use ODX, SAN storage must support this feature.

For more detailed information about ODX, please refer to the following articles on MSDN.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848056(v=vs.85).aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn265282(v=vs.85).aspx 

So how does it work?

 ODX is part of the Windows Server fast file copy (FFC) feature. VMM deployment uses FFC or BITS to run the VM copy. To leverage ODX capability, following are pre-requisites.

 Prerequisites as follow: 

• Only for new VM deployment from the VMM library
• RAA (run as account) on source and target
  • VMM and the hosts (source and target) must be on the trusted domain with no firewall among the environments. 
• VMM R2 agent
• VMM R2 Server
• Windows Server 2012 and above
• ODX supported SAN storage

In deploying a VM, as a default, FFC is turned on automatically. FFC provides 2 methods of copying: ODX and network. When copying the VM, FFC will initially start with ODX. ODX can support inter and intra lun copies.

If ODX is not supported on SAN storage, the FFC engine will revert to network base transfer. This VM deployment using FFC has built-in resiliency while transferring data.  If ODX and network base transfer has issues, FFC can revert to BITS.

This feature will be inclusive with differencing disk feature in the RTM timeframe.

Conclusion: 

 The System Center VMM 2012 R2 improved rapid provisioning for VM deployment from VMM library using ODX and FFC. Here are some of the highlights: 

• Increases VM deployment performance by offloading the cpu and network utilization to ODX supported SAN storage. (Seen 20-30% increase in performance for network.)
• With faster deployment, this can lessen interrupt to the host and shorten windows of maintenance.
• Built-in resiliency while copying VHD to host.