System Center Guide

I came across a great, 98-page white paper today on Virtual Machine Manager for Virtual Server 2005 SP1 in the branch office scenario. Here’s a few excepts from the Introduction:

If you have a branch office with a limited number of servers, you may be faced with unique challenges. It may be necessary for you to isolate workloads – for example, your customer data may have to be isolated from your system data for regulatory compliance. It may be expensive or impractical to add physical machines to separate your workloads.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 gives your branch office the ability to isolate server functionality on a single server. Migrating workloads to Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 can also offer the increased performance and efficiency of newer servers to your legacy applications and workloads, and can allow you to consolidate your workloads onto fewer, more fully-utilized machines. Consolidation can dramatically reduce server sprawl, increase your operational efficiency, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for your branch office.

This cookbook serves two purposes. First, you can follow the step-by-step instructions in a test environment to get a basic understanding of the concepts, techniques, and applications used in this scenario. Second, you can refer back to this cookbook as a how-to guide to performing specific tasks in a production environment.

To cover the bases, this cookbook probably contains more information than you need. In addition to the Table of Contents at the beginning of this guide, each section also includes its own table of contents so that you can easily find the steps that you need most. If you already have a component installed or a step completed, move on to the next step or section.

Download the Cookbook