I was asked earlier this week about differences between managing VMs using Hyper-V and managing them with SCVMM.
For the record, even if you import the Hyper-V host into SCVMM to be managed centrally you can continue to manage said host from Hyper-V manager. This is not the recommended way of doing business for a couple of reasons. 1 reason is since you purchased SCVMM, managing your hosts and VMs centrally is a key benefit.
If you have configured things like intelligent placement settings based on key system resources and you indirectly alter your setup by managing your VMs with a separate tool, you may be unknowingly causing your VMs to move needlessly whereas if you were managing these VMs centrally, you would see what you’re doing because you are in the same tool where this was all configured.
Also, in Hyper-V “imaging” or stateful image backup is done using snapshots. In SCVMM these are called checkpoints, the techniques may also differ slightly between Hyper-V and SCVMM and you are doubling up on the files which may be configured to be stored in different locations. These are not small files either…
One area in particular that I actually prefer sometimes to use Hyper-V manager is in mapping an ISO file to the optical drive on the VM. In SCVMM the ISO file must be in the library to do this. There are situations where you would not specifically want to have the ISO file in the library but simply to browse to the file location and mount it.
My wish would be to see there be 2 options in the VM properties for the optical drive when using an ISO image. 1 option would use the SCVMM library and the other option would allow you to map to the ISO image from a file system location.
There’s my 2 cents.