System Center Virtual Machine Manager, also known as System Center VMM or simply SCVMM, is a management tool developed by Microsoft to efficiently manage Hyper-V, particularly as a company’s virtual machine and services deployment size increases.
While Hyper-V includes its own tools for managing virtual machines (VMs), as an enterprise scales to include failover clustering, Hyper-V replication, or multiple Hyper-V hosts across a variety of physical servers, System Center Virtual Machine Manager helps simplify managing the scale of the virtualized infrastructure.
System Center VMM Manages Hyper-V, Citrix and VMware
System Center Virtual Machine Manager specifically facilitates configuring and managing virtualization host, networking and storage resources used in deploying virtual machines and services. System Center VMM works with a variety of virtualization hosts beyond just Hyper-V, including VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer.
The System Center Virtual Machine Manager setup includes the installation of a variety of core components and services, including VMM Management Server, VMM Console, Library Servers and integration with System Center Operations Manager and infrastructure servers like WSUS Servers.
System Center VMM vs. VMM
System Center VMM shares the VMM acronym with virtual machine monitor (VMM), a generic term that refers to the host program that allows a computer to support multiple and identical execution environments.
So while System Center Virtual Machine Manager refers to proprietary technology from Microsoft, the virtual machine monitor term can refer to any number of virtual machine monitoring and management tools and services from a variety of virtualization vendors.
