Amazon is integrating EC2 management with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Microsoft Windows administrators can use the familiar System Center user interface to provision and configure virtual machines running on Amazon EC2.
With enterprise customers moving workloads to cloud, they are looking for unified tools to seamlessly manage both on-premise and cloud resources. With this integration, customers can administer, monitor and manage virtual machines running in both the private cloud and public cloud environments. AWS Systems Manager for SCVMM is available to download and installs as an add-in to SCVMM. It uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to authenticate to Amazon EC2. Once setup, administrators can view all EC2 for Windows instances by region and availability zone, in addition to other hypervisors and environments already supported within SCVMM. They can use the SCVMM interface to perform common maintenance tasks such as restarting, stopping, and removing instances, as well as remotely accessing an instance using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
With this add-in, administrators can monitor the following resources:
- Amazon EC2 instances (Microsoft Windows and Linux)
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
- Elastic Load Balancing
- AWS CloudFormation stacks
- AWS Beanstalk applications
Customers with existing Microsoft System Center licenses can extend it to cloud through Microsoft License Mobility program.
Earlier this year, Amazon has shipped a similar plug-in for VMware vCenter. Apart from integrating with the vCenter user interface, Amazon has also made it easy to import VMDK, the native file format of VMware images to Amazon EC2.
By targeting both Microsoft SCVMM and VMware vCenter, Amazon is trying to become more accessible for enterprise IT teams.