What's the "Infrastructure thing" in SCVMM 2012 R2?

What’s the Infrastructure thing in SCVMM 2012 R2?

In this blog post, I would like to highlight a minor feature in SCVMM 2012 R2, that you just might happened to ignore at first.

I am talking about the fabric once again, and in the fabric workspace, we now have something called ‘Infrastructure’.

If you highlight this in the SCVMM console, you will find your SCVMM management servers listed here.

When you add a PXE server, a vCenter server or another Library server as well, they will all be listed under ‘Infrastructure’.

This is not just another way to categorize the workload.

Example:

In Windows Server 2012 R2, we now have the multi-tenant network virtualization gateway presented in the RRAS role. We can manage this end-to-end with SCVMM 2012 R2.

(Read more about this at http://kristiannese.blogspot.no/2013/06/how-to-add-your-virtualization-gateways.html and http://kristiannese.blogspot.no/2013/07/building-network-virtualization-gateway.html )

A key thing to remember in this scenario, is that VMM is fully capable (and IMO – also responsible) for maintaining the datacenter infrastructure.

This leads us to the integration of WSUS with SCVMM 2012 R2.

I wan’t to maintaint my virtualization gateways (since they are running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 OS) in the similar way like my other server roles. For this to happen, I can simply add my virtualization gateways as ‘Infrastructure’ in SCVMM, and put them into my maintenance plan.

To summarize:

This is actually a good thing, to let SCVMM keep track on the baselines for all of your infrastructure related to your datacenter and cloud, while leaving SCCM alone with the other server roles and its clients.

Further, I would also like to add my IPAM servers, dedicated domain controllers (if I had) and so on.

Have fun exploring the new capabilities in SCVMM 2012 R2.