This is good news for multihypervisor shops. Microsoft pushed out the beta of Virtual Machine Manager today, which includes management support of VMware.

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager (err... SCVMM) 2008 beta was officially announced at the Microsoft Management Summit in Vegas today. The big news includes support for Hyper-V and VMware infrastructures from one console. No official word on Xen support, but Microsoft will look to add Xen management "if customer demand is there." I think it will be. Click here for the SCVMM 2008 site.

The beta allows customers to configure and deploy new VMs from a centralized library and centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Win2K8 Hyper-V, Virtual Server '05 R2, or VMware ESX Server. Full System Center shops can effectively manage both their virtualized and physical servers with one tool, thanks to VMM's integration with VMWare's Virtual Center API. I'll say it one more time: This is good stuff.

We'll be tinkering with the VMM beta in our lab and I'm assuming the System Center plug-in will go live when Hyper-V hits production. Anyone else want to bet on June as a release target?

The folks over at the Windows Virt Blog are understandably pumped up about this; check out a post from a member of the VMM dev team, Hector Linares, here. I like the bumper sticker.

Robust VMware support, the possibility of Xen integration, better Linux management thanks to OpenPegasus code... I think System Center is starting to look pretty darn good. Especially if you need to manage VMs.