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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
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.
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.
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.
It's so that customers can run NT4-specific apps under future products like Windows Server 2003. See this eWeek article.
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.
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.