But we found that VRM is more of a provisioning tool for deploying and controlling access to virtual machines, and is less effective when it comes to the subsequent management of the successfully installed VMs. (See .)

Also, not all hypervisors are equal in terms of VRM's ability to control and manipulate VMs running on top of them. VMware-based VMs are definitely more malleable under VRM's control than instances running atop Hyper-V and XenServer.

Generally, there were more manual steps to use the DynamicOps tools to control non VMware-grounded VMs.

DynamicOps VRM (we mainly tested Version 3.1.0 except for when the company supplied 3.1.1 to address issues we had with Windows 2008 Server support of Windows Imaging Format [WIM] imaging needed to support Hyper-V) must be installed on a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 R2. We were able to install it inside an appropriate Windows 2003R2 virtual machine without issue. The program needs access to at least two CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 40GB of disk space.

It also needs a database. We tested it with SQL Server Express 2005, but it also works with SQL Server 2005. Microsoft .Net 3.5 and Microsoft IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET are also required.