The Release Candidate (RC) for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is now available for download on Microsoft Connect.

The major new features included with SCVMM 2008 R2 are:

• Storage Migration: Enables migration of a VM’s storage while VM is running both within same host (with no downtime) and across other hosts (with minimum downtime).
• Live Migration Queuing: By default Windows Server 2008 R2 can do only one Live Migration at a time. SCVMM 2008 R2 allows queuing of simultaneous live migration requests and retrying later on.
• Rapid Provisioning: Allows administrators to use new SAN technologies to clone a LUN containing a VHD and present it to the host. Saves a lot of time, as the network copy (BITS) is not required.
• Host compatibility Checks: Deep compatibility tests for testing hardware compatibility are included, which allows testing to be done before attempting migration (and subsequently failing). Also includes features that will make the VM compatible with the new host before migration.
• Support for 3rd party Clustered File Systems (CFS): Support for third party clustered files systems similar to Microsoft’s Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). Example: Melo from Sanbolic
• Support for Veritas Volume Manager: SCVMM 2008 R2 now recognizes Veritas Volume Manager disks as cluster disk resources.

Happy virtualization!