Specifications

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Reviewer’s Guide 88
Figure 67. The Intelligent Placement report provides an easy-to-understand “ranking” of host candidates.
Load-Balancing or Resource-Maximization
Administrators use one of two default algorithms to tune the Intelligent Placement results. The load-
balancing algorithm is meant for situations in which the administrator wishes to equally distribute
workloads across a set number of servers. For situations in which the administrator wants to avoid
adding servers, the resource-maximization algorithm helps ensure deployed servers are fully utilized.
Reduce Downtime and Enable Dynamic IT Management with Live Migration
VMM 2008 R2’s Live Migration feature is able to reduce planned downtime and when combined with
the VMM’s PRO feature can lay the foundation for dynamic IT management. You can use Live
Migration to move Hyper-V virtual machines to different Hyper-V host computers with no downtime.
This enables you to perform routine hardware or software maintenance to the physical host. When the
maintenance is completed, you can live-migrate the virtual machines back to the updated host – all with
no downtime for the virtual machines and without any end user downtime or interruption.
Combining Live Migration with VMM PRO enables completely dynamic IT management. For example,
you can use VMM’s PRO feature to specify maximum resource utilization levels for either Hyper-V
hosts or the virtual machines running on those hosts. When the Hyper-V host or virtual machine
exceeds those levels then the PRO feature can automatically implement a PRO Tip that performs a