Sitting at Microsoft’s London offices waiting for this evening’s Microsoft Virtualization User Group (MVUG) event to start reminded me that I still haven’t written up my notes on the various technologies that make up Microsoft’s virtualisation portfolio. It’s been three months since I spent a couple of days in Reading learning about this, and tonight was a great recap – along with some news (some of which I can’t write about just yet – wait for PDC is all I can say! – and some of which I can).

A few weeks back, I highlighted in my post on virtualisation as an infrastructure architecture consideration that Microsoft’s virtualisation strategy is much broader than just server virtualisation, or virtual desktop infrastructure and introduced the following diagram, based on one which appears in many Microsoft slidedecks:

At the heart of the strategy is System Center and, whereas VMware will highlight a number of technical weaknesses in the Microsoft products (some of which are of little consequence in reality), this is where Microsoft’s strength lies – especially with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 just about to be released (more on that soon) – as management is absolutely critical to successful implementation of a virtualisation strategy.

Over the next few days I’ll discuss the various components included in this diagram and highlight some of the key points about the various streams: server; desktop; application; and presentation virtualisation – as well as how they are all brought together in System Center.