Many people ignore that despite being an Exchange Specialist I am a virtualization freak and have solid working knowledge of the System Center Suite as I used to work as full-time SMS (2.0) Administrator which evolved and became part of the System Center products suite.
In the series I will guide you through the installation, configuration and administration of the System Center product used to manage Virtualization hosts (either Hyper-V or ESX) System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
In this first post I will describe the software needed for SCVMM installation, pre-requisites that needs to be installed on the base OS and which user accounts needs to be created for a succesful SCVMM installation.
Install SCVMM – What do I need?
In the series we will be deploying SCVMM to a lab machine and will be performing a “single host” installation which serves perfectly our needs but in any way this has to be intended as a design suggestion or best practice for real world deployments, the following is what we will be using:
| Name | Role | Domain Join |
| SRV-ADS01 | Domain Controller and DNS | Yes |
| SRV-SCVMM01 | VMM Management Server and Console | Yes |
| SRV-HYPERV01 | Host running Hyper-V hypervisor | Yes |
| SRV-HYPERV02 | Host running Hyper-V hypervisor | Yes |
| SRV-ESX01 | Host running ESXi 5.5 hypervisor | N/A |
| SRV-ESX02 | Host running ESXi 5.5 hypervisor | N/A |
All machines will be running Windows 2012 R2 with the latest updates, the SQL database version is SQL2012 with latest updates.
If you, like me, don’t have an active MSDN subscription you can download a fully functional evaluation copy of all the software components from here while VMware ESXi can be downloaded free of charge here.
Install SCVMM – User Accounts creation
SCVMM makes use of a number of different user accounts which needs to be created beforehand, here’s a list of the user accounts and groups that we will be using:
| Name | Description | Type |
| scvmmsvc | SCVMM Service Account | User |
| scvmmadmin | RunAs account used to manage hosts | User |
| sqlsvc | SQL Service Account | User |
| SCVMM-Admins | SCVMM Administrators | Global Group |
Once all users and groups have been created add scvmmadmin and scvmmsvc accounts to the SCVMM-Admins group and make this group member of the local Administrators group on the SCVMM server.
Install SCVMM – Pre-Requisite software
Once the base OS has been installed and the needed user accounts/groups have been created Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for Windows 8.1 needs to be installed on the server otherwise during installation you will be notified of the missing pre-requisite and will be asked to install it, Windows ADK can be downloaded from here.
Once Windows ADK has finished downloading just start the installation following the wizard and customizing as necessary:
In the Select Feature to install screen be sure to select only Deployment Tools and Windows Preinstallation Environment (WindowsPE) as these are the only components needed by SCVMM install:
Click on Install, grab a cup of coffee as the installation will take a bit depending on the server’s configuration and network connection speed, once ADK is completely installed we will proceed with SQL installation.
This is all for this post, in the next article I will go through the installation of SQL Server and SCVMM components installation until then take a minute to subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified about new articles and take a second to share the post if you found it useful!
