Difference between revisions of "VMM 2008 Architecture and Port Usage"

Revision as of 15:03, 9 February 2009

Whilst an understanding of the architecture of VMM 2008 is not essential in order to bale to use this technology, having basic understanding of how the system works can be useful, especially when attempting to diagnose problems. Of particular significance, especially in distributed configurations, are the different transport ports used by the different VMM components in order to communicate both with each other and with host systems.

This chapter of VMM 2008 Essentials aims to provide a high level overview of the architecture of VMM 2008, together with a summary of the different ports used by VMM 2008 to communicate. The latter information will be of considerable use when configuring firewalls to allow remote administration of virtual machines using VMM 2008.

The VMM 2008 Client Layer

The VMM Administrator Console, VMM Self-Service portal, Systems Center OpsMgr and Windows PowerShell cmdlets all reside in the Client Layer of the VMM 2008 architecture. The common theme amongst these components is that they all provide user interfaces for the management and monitoring of virtual machine hosts, virtual machines and the overall virtualization infrastructure.

VMM 2008 Port Usage

As outlined in the VMM 2008 Components chapter of this book, VMM 2008 consists of a number of different components which all communicate, both with each other and with virtualization hosts. This communication takes place using standard network transport ports. Because the VMM components may be distributed over a multiple systems, it is helpful to have an understanding of which ports are used, especially in terms of firewall configuration. An overview of these ports is provided in the following table: