The Microsoft equivalent to VirtualCenter is named Microsoft System Center Virtual Machines Manager. The 2007 version is out while the 2008 is in beta. t should provide live migration capabilities and simplify management of large Hyper-V farms. So, it should be included in every installation of Hyper-V. But no, Microsoft, doing the same as VMware, is selling the package separately from the Windows 2008 server OS. Nice way to increase your income, not so nice for us that are on a budget…

Well, over to the snarfu:

1. The installation package is a massive 2.7GiB. VMware VirtualCenter, including MS SQL 2005, is 577MiB.
2. The system is depended upon a Active Directory Domain. Nice, another application package to administrate. I can see why you want a domain to handle user management, access control and so on, but it isn’t the most user friendly interface. And, it is extremely overkill if you only want to run virtual machines and not your entire organization on the same server farm. The virtual machine manager should be able to manage user management and access control lists on itself given an administrator account on the hosts that it should manage.
   It looks like you can add any host after installing the SCVMM on a domain host. Why you need the Active Directory is still a puzzle…
3. The SCVMM 2008 beta seems a bit unstable, to say the least. The Virtual Machine Manager keeps crashing every time I try to do something in the administration client.
4. You can actually manage VMware VirtualCenter hosts from SCVMM. I doesn’t work the other way around.

The crashing made it impossible to continue with Hyper-V. The impression I have of Hyper-V is that it is unfinished and needs a lot of polishing before it is ready for prime time. It might be an alternative for those of you who doesn’t have a virtualization solution already and depend upon the WIndows 2008 server OS for other tasks, but if you are serious about virtualization, go for VMware.