Hardware and capability profiles are library resources such as processors and memory that are available for a virtual machine. As library resources, both types of capabilities are defined within the Library workspace in the VMM Administrator. The properties for existing capability profiles also are accessed within the Library workspace.
Capability profiles are frequently used to ensure that a virtual machine or service uses a minimum number or amount of a resource. For example, Figure 1-22 shows the Create Capability Profile Wizard, in which a minimum number of network adapters are required.
FIGURE 1-22 Defining a minimum number of network adapters with a capability profile.
You can also use Capability Profiles to define whether a virtual machine is created on a high availability cluster. Capability Profiles are edited within the Library section by selecting Properties.
Virtual Machine Manager has three built-in Capability Profiles: Hyper-V, XenServer, and ESX Server. The definition of each profile reflects the different capabilities inherent in each respective platform. For example, the XenServer profile allows only a maximum of 32GB of memory, whereas the Hyper-V profile can use up to 64GB.
Hardware profiles store specific hardware information rather than ranges as with Capability Profiles. For example, Figure 1-23 illustrates a Hardware profile being configured to use a specific type of SCSI Adapter. This might be used in a case where the application requires a certain type of adapter.
FIGURE 1-23 Creating a hardware profile in VMM.
