About Virtualization Management in Essentials

Applies To: System Center Essentials 2010

Virtualization is a computing technology whereby one computer can host complete environments on areas of storage space, called virtual machines. A user can log on to a virtual machine, and the environment appears and functions just as it would if it were running on the physical computer itself.

Organizations often assign a virtual machine host to a particular business component. For example, a company might have all of its databases built on virtual machines hosted by a single computer. The company’s Web content might be stored on another host.

After computers have been installed and joined to a network, you can use System Center Essentials 2010 discovery to locate physical computers that meet the system requirements for designation and preparation as hosts. Essentials will only manage one virtual machine host per physical host.

You can designate and configure servers as hosts for virtual machines in Essentials 2010 from the Essentials management server or from the Essentials console. You can also set up and manage the virtual machines on hosts in trusted domains, workgroups, or perimeter networks.

Important

If you have Essentials 2010 installed with Virtualization Management and you also have System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 installed, we recommend that you only manage virtual machines in Essentials 2010 instead of in the VMM Administrator console to prevent conflicts between applications.

After you have designated a server as a host for virtual machines, Essentials 2010 recommends performance and resource optimization (PRO) tips, also named optimization tips, which you can implement to help improve the performance of host servers and virtual machines in your environment. You can manually implement optimization tips, configure Essentials 2010 to implement optimization tips, or disable optimization tips. New optimization tips and future optimization tips will be available as management packs.