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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?"
Of course MS will buy one of the implementors of this kind of technology. Look at Citrix. Of course, it will run well, 1 or 2 versions later. Of course, it will NOT run other OSes as well, or even at all. There will be undocumented hacks, which might make it work better.
The problem is that MS stuff doesn't run on anything but x86 these days. I want a real hardware platform, like IBM makes, where I can carve out a few LPARs on a 32-way box with 8GB of RAM. Then I'll run Windows200x on it, with my other OS in that. Real hardware redundancy, etc.
Using Linux as an example--
Its far better to run Linux and Win-in-VMWare (free + VMWare) than MS and Linux-in-its-VMWare-clone. Do you trust MS stuff to be the core OS?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I wonder if this is part of an attack against Apple?
As those of you not familiar with the Mac Marketplace might not know, Connectix makes the popular Mac application Virtual-PC. Virtual PC allows Apple owners to emulate a complete PC enviornment on their Apple machines, at somewhat reasonable speed.
They seem to have had favorable licensing with Microsoft in the past, as they offer pre-installed images for certain OS systems, such as Windows XP, 2000, etc. While they do (I assume) pay MS for each license, it does help people to break the MS dependance gradually, as they can still run their old applications under emulation.
If they eleminated this crutch for people switching to apple, and then later discontinued Office... Apple would lose most of it's corporate market.
So- As useful as this technology is in the Server market (and keep in mind this is closer to Bochs than VMware), I can see MS execs encouraging this buyout to help keep control over the future of Apple.
Colin
Colin Davis
After all, each copy of VPC represents another Windows license (for the most part). I would think it would be to their advantage to get as many mac users as possible using VPC.
Or maybe it's just a way to extend the Windows monopoly, and maybe DRM/Paladium/etc. A few years ago, I was in a store where a customer was returning an iMac, complaining that it was constantly crashing. Turned out that the user ran VPC full time, and didn't know what the MacOS was.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
A number of things come to mind here.
1. Clearly this anti-trust stuff does not prevent Microsoft from buying up competitors.
2. Given this, what is to stop them simply buying ALL the competition? They're rich enough.
3. Profit for Microsoft.
The only way that Netscape could compete with them was by opening up their source. That's what gives us Mozilla. Could it be that the economy has got so lopsided that the only way to not get bought (or crushed) by Microsoft is to open your code and hope that all the programmers worldwide won't get indidivually bought off the project?
Really, all you free-market guys out there - how does this work? When do we get normality again?
Coincidentally, about 3 days ago I installed Connectix's Virtual PC product. It appears to be very Windows-oriented; Connectix sells licensed "system images" with various flavours of Windows pre-installed. For the purposes of a uni project I tried to install Mandrake 7.2 on my virtual PC, giving it a healthy 64MB of RAM and a 10 gig HDD. The install did pretty well until the X configuration part, when it asked for my video card -- it totally gagged; I mean, what graphics card was I supposed to choose on this virtual machine? Nothing I tried worked, and the install eventually fell over. Apparently VMWare supplies its own drivers for X; I don't know whether connectix does as I ceased experimenting at that point. Anybody else been more successful?
On the other hand, the text-mode stuff worked fine...
If you are running 50 instances of NT Server on a single box, how many NT licenses do you need?
;-)
I suppose that depends on whether it's licensed per running instance, or per CPU. I know Solaris is licensed per CPU so you can run multiple instances with a single license.
You couldn't pay me enough to get near an NT machine so I really don't know.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Could this be a move by Microsoft to buy up the rights to Connectix's Virtual Game Station (a PSX emulator) and port it to the Xbox? I'm not sure if it'd be an advantage or a disadvantage, but they *could* conveniently not get the PSX copy protection to work properly.
Connectix VGS was once the best and most promising of the Playstation emulators, until Sony bought up the company and squashed the project. Does anyone else think this is a factor in MS's decision?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
No sig, sorry.
it might be similar if MS decides to make VMware not run on windows now that they have their own and thereby crush VMware.
PS, i've used vmware, and it's great. Can't speak for the other product.
Or perhaps Microsoft will do something good this time...
Schnapple
Wasn't it M$ who wrote DOS and Windows?
Shouldn't M$ have excellent knowledge of x86 and PC architecture?
Says a lot about their code and engineers. This acquisition is a SLAP right in their own people faces!
BTW: didn't buy M$ Insignia Code years ago whose flagship product at that time was SoftPC ?? Seems that M$ wasn't able to handle and extend the code...
What a luck I don't have to use any M$ products.
This stuff is really cool, and I'm glad the industry is starting to wake up to the possibilities.
I see this as something that's more likely to popularize virtual computer technology, rather than something that's likely to eliminate our options. Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball, and I could be wrong.
I have a box that I use mostly to run VMware client OSs. Linux is my host OS, I have a very sparse and clean linux from scratch system set up on the box. I've got all kinds of stuff stashed away in various VMs.
The great thing about this sort of setup is the flexibility. The client OSs are basically just data files on the host os. If you copy the files, you've backed up the system, or cloned it.
You can move the files to other machines that have different hardware -- you don't have to worry about the sound and video card drivers.
And you can even replace the host OS without being too disruptive. I used to run redhat as the host OS, but I copied off the data files, set up my linux from scratch system, and brought the data files back in. Everything was fine.
The result of this is that the chains of dependency that exist between hardware, operating system installations, and applications become much less restrictive.
Another result is that it's trivial to play with new systems -- I don't run OpenBSD, for example, but everytime they could out with a new one, I install it, just to keep my hand in.
All this is, at bottom, is just a more flexible way of looking at OSs. An OS becomes a blob of data that's easier to move around from one hunk of hardware to another. And it's easier to keep lots of those OS blobs on a given machine.
It's a great way to deal with "staging" servers. You can take a production server (which is really a VM), copy it, and do whatever you want to the copy, without damaging anything. When everything is working properly, you can slide the new server into place. If you need to revert, you can just go back to the old data.
I suspect that this functionality is part of what MS is after.
Microsoft paid my university a visit a few months ago, and I was rather surprised to see that on one of their demo machines they actually had VMware installed, together with all sorts of Unix OSes configured, not something I'd have expected to see.
Four months ago, our company tried buying a copy of VMware with WinXP licenced to run in the VM. VMware said that they were working out a new license with Microsoft so they could sell XP and that we should call them back in a couple of months. Our purchasing guy has called them once a month since then and we still can't get it.
Now I know why it's taking so long...
Perfect! No more need to sell Office v.X for MacOS without a Windows license.
The only reason I can see to do this is if you're happy to use Windows unlicenced but don't want to do the same with Connectix. Since they'll now both be from Microsoft, you can share and enjoy without worrying about the subtle distinction.
Personally I just install someone's copy of VPC w/W98 - and use it for five minutes about once every two years.
I've been playing with User-Mode Linux a bit recently; it's a port of Linux to run on Linux :-) (instead of running on real hardware, it does hardware-ish things via Linux syscalls). It runs as an unpriviledged user, but has its own internal users, permissions, even a root user.
It's a nifty idea, but it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities - other than say nice there's no way to really manage the CPU, and you can't quota the network bandwidth in and out of the VMs, you can't limit the working set size of each VM, and so on. A process misbehaving in one UML VM can still affect others on the machine.
The real use for UML is in development environments, it allows you to very quickly set up test systems. Start 5 VMs and now you can test your distributed app for race conditions without having to buy and spend time configuring physical kit.
Lots of mac users depend on this software to run a variety of OSs.. I don't use it for windows, becuase it's uselessly slow for almost everything, but it's been great for testing linux configurations and the like. I had hoped to get some RTOS work on it as well, as it's easy to take a bunch of installations with me on my powerbook, even if they are slow.
If this program were open source, one company couldn't come along and buy it up and lock it away, or just plain not support it anymore. You can betcha that those cheap versions of this product with PC-DOS shipping are going to end in a hurry. I've actually USED that OS on VirtualPC, and it was snappy enough to be useful. The program isn't open source, so everyone is SOL. All the WORSE that the buying party is Microsoft - and they have enough cash to do this to whatever company that makes whatever killer app you like. Scarey, huh?
Even if this product continues to be developed, I will have to take a much harder look at where it's going on the mac platform in the future. That's a shame.
Perhaps this will help entrench the mac developers and users firmly in the open source world.
..don't panic
Microsoft would have no reason to want to stop VPC users buying windows, at all, no.
However, Microsoft also has no reason to want certain things about VPC to stay the way they are. For example, the fact it is screamingly fast. For a long time, one of the big bragging points mac users had was that we could run windows, *emulated*, at about the speed as a windows machine with half the mhz. (I don't know how current models perform.) That's really, really impressive insofar as emulation goes. Microsoft also has no reason to want VPC to continue to be as clean and effective as it has been.
What i am saying is that people don't come to VPC on a lark: it is an expensive piece of software, and people come to it becuase they need to get something out of it, usually to run some windows-only program. This means VPC's quality can suffer, and Microsoft will have no reason to consider this a bad thing-- at the moment, VPC has no serious competitors, so people will keep buying VPC.
Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.
There is also no reason not for Microsoft to continue as they have and then, after a couple versions, slowly let wierd bugs, incompatibilities, etc, creep into VPC., until mac users *still* can run windows, but they only do so becuase they need to run windows for some reason-- because VPC has become enough of a pain that the PPC's wonderful talent for emulation no longer seems like much of an advantage over the x86.
Am i saying Microsoft is going to do this? Well.. no. In fact, i don't think they will, becuase macslash is reporting that apparently the VPC team will report directly to the MacBU, not to seattle. This means that they will continue, almost certainly, to make VPC as much a quality product as possible. So there goes that conspiracy theory out the window right there.
However, it does bother me that Microsoft is able to take big, important groups like Connectix and Softway (Interix) and buy them up just like that. Yes, they are buying them for apparently benign purposes. But what it seems like to me is that while Microsoft is not buying these companies so they can quash or disable them, they are buying them so that they can keep their eye on them. Potentially, something like Interix or VPC could become a big stepstone in some kind of major migration away from Microsoft. if Microsoft owns those companies, however, if it looks like such a thing is going to happen, MS can take steps to prevent it, so long as MS always keeps the quality of those companies' products so high that there never is a reason for a competitor to arise. Threat management.
This brings me to my question: how on earth is MS going to make Palladium work with VPC? Palladium becomes pointless unless those keys are kept secret, and if MS embeds those keys into a macintosh executable then extracting them will be trivial. So how is MS planning to make Palladium work in VPC? Are they going to require a PCI card with a palladium chip in it, or what? That would still toss out Palladium's concept of the secure keyboard-to-processor-to-monitor path, but it would at least keep the keys locked safely in silicon. Or, much more likely, are they just going to not let VPC run palladium apps, since the Mac OS is not "secure"?
So, here's a slightly more likely conspiracy theory. Perhaps MS [only partially of course-- i've no doubt they're mainly buying Connectix for the reasons they say they are] likes the idea of buying Connectix because it removes the risk Connectix will attempt to emulate Palladium within VPC? I mean, Palladium is going to be damned hard to crack, but if anyone at this exact moment in time has both the resources and the reason to crack palladium, it's Connectix or nobody. I really haven't the foggiest idea what Connectix was planning to do about Palladium, but they have experience at cracking closed systems-- they reverse-engineered the PSX. That expertise, and a few hours rented time with an electron microscope to pull on the Palladium's keys, and suddenly MS is no longer the sole source or vendor of their Palladium platform.
Would that have actually happened? I have no idea. But it certainly won't now. Maybe not a big deal, but certainly convenient for Microsoft either way, no?
Just like it's "convenient" that Bungie's excellent cross-platform game development library, rather than being sold off with Oni and Myth, is currently buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Well, if Microsoft is truly dedicated to their new "Security Initiative," they will follow Apple's lead once again. They will do a complete re-write of the OS and use an emulation layer that's built into the OS (cough) Classic Mode (cough) to run older software. I'd love to see a completely open *nix-distro as the core of the OS (re: Darwin), but that's probably asking too much...
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Saint-Exupery
Can't believe I haven't seen any previous posts ask this question, but what do you think the effect is going to be on the average user who has no use for or interest in a VirtualMachine? I remember serious issues dealing with the awkward integration of IE into the OS. (Okay, so my memory doesn't have to stretch too far for that, but I mean _especially_ in the early days.) Are we going to see a Windows where you have no choice but to run in an emulation layer that is poorly shoved into low-level OS routines?
Chuck
it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities
Check out the recent announcements by Kevin Lawton of the plex86 project (Slashdot covered it here). He said he would be ripping out most of the complicated stuff from plex86, and making it work with "well-behaved" guest operating systems (specifically, Linux). From what I understand, it will be suitable for running multiple VMs that are isolated from each other and the host OS, and it should be possible to control their resources better.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I can think of a very important thing that this acquisition gets Microsoft. Right now on the server side there is a push towards 64 bit which is going to become stronger with time due to the 64 gig limit for x86. OTOH one of Microsoft's key advantages is the wealth of Wintel legacy code which doesn't run under Windows advanced server (their Itanium 2 product). Connetix sells x86 emulations software that works so well that Connetix + Microsoft OS will run almost every app runs comfortablely on a PowerPC. The same setup should work for Itanium 2.
Bundeling in an x86 emulator with the Itanium 2 product will allow Microsoft to ease their customer's switch to 64 bit hardware and not create a situation where people reevaluate their OS line just because they are ready to switch CPU lines.
Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
That's only half the question: will their virtual machine's run on other host OS's other than Microsoft?
That's part of what I really like about vmware - I have a win2k box and a linux box both running vmware and love the uniformity of having (sure the linux version is a bit less user friendly) the same app accross both of them.
Hell, if I feel like it I can shift an entire virtual machine from the linux box to the win2k box (or vice versa) if I don't want to suck up the CPU on the linux box, all I have to do is tweak a couple of parameters in the config - let's see MS's cheap imitation do that!
Once upon a time Connectix Developed a PSX emulator for the mac, which they started to port to the PC (it had a court case with Sony and so it was put on hold... IIRC).
One of the selling points of the PS2 is that it plays PS1 games (massive market already), using code that has already been developed by Connectix, MS could have an emulator for PS1 (and possibly PS2) which runs on the Xbox (or Xbox2), if Xbox can play PS games then there is less of a reason to by PS2 / PS3 as opposed to Xbox / Xbox2.
I think it's almost definate that we will see Connectix Technology incorporated into the Xbox as well as windows, in fact this could be more key to the purchase than incorparting VM technology into Windows, although I think having a windows server that could host a bunch of VM's with different OS's is a cool idea.