Instead, PRO tips works as a reasonable heuristics system for monitoring VM conditions and making recommendations as how to proceed based on criteria we set. We can't recommend it for larger installations, and certainly not for those installations that have non-Windows VM guests.

In order for PRO tips to pull data from specific VMs and their host platforms, you have to install the appropriate agent software. These agents are only available for Windows environments. We had to install agents on each Hyper-V host and each individual VM. For the ESX platform, we installed an agent on ESX Windows VMs. Microsoft does not yet offer PRO tips agent software for Linux-based VMs.

The reports are useful, but only for trend analysis and audit purposes, as data discovery isn't really trigger-based, but rather, trend-based. For those looking for trend analysis, the PRO tips reports were the best of the products tested this round.

Security management

There doesn't seem to be anything inherent in SC VMM that makes it more secure other than the role-based management capabilities outlined above. In reality, SC VMM uses whatever security policies that are setup in the Windows Active Directory domain.