Slashdot Mirror
VMware: Another Netscape?
An anonymous reader writes "
This CRN article states that Microsoft is about to buy Connectix and enter the server consolidation market. Connectix makes virtual machines products that compete with those of VMware. Quote: 'The technology will be integrated into the Windows code, sources said.' Will Microsoft be able to pull this one off? Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?"
It's most likely desireable because they want to be able to run partitioned servers, much like one can do now with VMWare. Of course, I'm sure they won't mind 'embracing and extending' the product out of Mac-Space. It is probably the core virtualization technology that they are after though.
According to MacCentral. This could be good for the Mac, meaning the development team would have more access to Windows code and be able to guess how things are working less. Or it could be bad. And I have no idea what to think. Microsoft still makes money off of the license that goes with the sale of VirtualPC.
Microsoft would have no reason to want to stop this.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
As stupid as this sounds, virtual machines a la VMware are an inexpensive way to test / debug clustering software, including beowulf.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
First it was failover because you couldn't put more than one server process on a Windows box and get 7/24/365 uptime. They fell over far too often. So run 2 identical boxes and WHEN one failed, the other took over. The large Sun, IBM, and HP boxes can run 64 CPUs without a problem and hundreds of server processes for 7/24/365.25.
But Microsoft wants to say it can do this too. Enter Conectix. Now you can hide those duplicate servers in one box! Yeah, scalable and 7/24/365.25 reliability and your support budget will be really small. I can see the press releases coming out of eWeak and C/Net now.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Microsoft owns VMware as well, or at least has invested in it.
No. I don't know where you think you heard this, but it's completely false.
Answer: You must pay as much money as microsoft says when their lawyers come knocking on your door threatening to audit you unless you simply cough up some cash for licenses. :)
Having run both Connectix's emulation solution and VMWare's true Virtual Machine solution, I can tell you there is no comparison in performance for the Workstation level products -- VMWare is the clear winner. Also VMWare's ESX server platform (based on RH Linux) is the best x86 based, non-specific-HW Platform solution out there for running Windows and non-Windows Operating Systems. VMWare's only real competition from the performance standpoint is Viruozzo from SW-Soft. The caveat with Virtuozzo is that it supports only Linux.
Uh, look at where kma works (VMware); that should be sufficient proof.
yes, if you read of any Connectix's docs you'll see that they emulate an S3 Trio 64 video card, as well as the rest of the hardware. I have installed RH 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 8.0, 8.2, 9.0, Lycoris (Redmund), Suse 7.2, 7.3, 8.1 with success.
The Unisys ES7000 can run 1 32 way or as many as 8 4 way win2k machines. hardware partitioning, don't know how dynamic it is for software instances.
Don't understand your citrix comment comes from. MS didn't buy them. Citrix is thin client stuff anyhow, nothing to do with virtualization.
MS does run on non x86 - there have been Itanium revs for devel use for over a year. IBM nor Dec were stellar partners, back when their chips could run NT.
Does linux support hot swap PCI? NT has since 4.0. If linux doesn't, I can't see how it would make sense as the underlying os. I would have the utmost confidence in MS stuff as the core OS - I would think about not assigning an IP to it, and managing the box via KVM over IP, or something else, so security hotfixes are a non issue.
ostiguy
It's so that customers can run NT4-specific apps under future products like Windows Server 2003. See this eWeek article.
Really? Check out Hotline and Carracho, and the serial numbers database app (whatever it's called these days). I find it much easier to find what I need for the Mac than for Windows. The unlicenced-copying is just better and better-organised, same as with other Mac software and support.
You got the first part right, though - piracy really has made Gates the richest hypocrite in the world. It's pretty galling to see Microsoft busting on unlicenced Windows copys every month, when that's the only reason Windows and Office have such market dominance (heck, it's the only reason there's a market - all those big hard disks and CD burners and mediamediamedia didn't come along overnight - and they didn't come along supporting purchased software).
You misunderstand. VMware is an IA-32 virtualization application, which means is forms an application barrier around (and therefore requires) a real x86 processor. Its free-software counterpart is plex86. You'll never see a versaion of VMware for OS X until you first see OS X running on the IA-32 (x86) platform.
Connetix VirtualPC is an IA-32 emulator, meaning it emulates in software the functions of x86 hardware. Its free-software counterpart is bochs, which is available for OS X today.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
While M$ doesn't own VMWare, they're certainly on friendly business terms.
-- This sig for rent.
I've used Connectix and VMWare and VMWare kicks connectix's butt. I think Connectix uses a CPU level emulation to run, where VMWare uses a vitual machine. In short VMware run about 95% the speed of the host CPU while Connectix was running less the 50%. I could be different these days. Does anyone have any up-to-date performance information?? VMWare Rules! (Plus it runs on Linux)
Yeah, I seem to remember hearing that the reason that the low-end edition of VPC ships with IBM's PC-DOS instead of MS-DOS is only because MS refused to license stand-alone MS-DOS to Connectix. As far as Microsoft is concerned, DOS without Windows is a non-platform.
I think it's very likely that the DOS-only edition of VPC will disappear, assuming that VPC for Mac continues to exist.
if you run 2 VM's, each running the same OS and same server process then if one goes down the other could be configured to take over. In the world of MS Windows, your OS and app is more likely to fail before the hardware. So there is an advantage in here and Microsoft might be able to say admin costs are consolidated too but I doubt that's going to be reality.
Good point though. The hardware failover goes away in this configuration.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
He is not patriotic. Ever heard of the american ideal "I disagree with what you say but I would defend to the death your right to say it." Rush would instead make a stupid name for you to shut you up. That's not patriotic. Disagreeing with you doesn't make one a traitor, but I have heard Rush imply that Daschle, for example, is a traitor. That liberals don't even want what is good for the country, they are not wrong, but malevolent. The man doesn't believe in the American ideal of a great democratic conversation. Your comments on 100% of protesters are, I'm sure, very carefully researched and backed with interviews and statistics, just as Rush's positions always are. BTW: there is no evidence that the Clinton's killed Vince Foster. But he is a hell of a broadcaster, and I enjoy listening to him. But his a satire artist, a political buffoon in the traditional sense, mocking the powers that be, which is great... except now his party is in power, and so that makes him more of a propagandist than humorist.