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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?"
...now we can have a tail-recursive win32 delay loop.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
if virtual pc will be suspended for the mac.
are they more concerned about stopping adoption of os x, or more concerned about selling windows licenses to mac users?
What will happed the Connectix's products for the Macintosh and OS 2?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Microsoft To Buy Connectix To Enter Server Consolidation Market
Assimilation to be announced Thursday
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
If you are running 50 instances of NT Server on a single box, how many NT licenses do you need?
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.
that they're just trying to find some way to make it look like typing "ls" on a Linux shell gives you a BSOD.
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.
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.
Instead of:
"...Microsoft is about to buy Connectix and enter the server consolidation market."
Doesn't the author mean to say:
"...Microsoft is about to buy Connectix and enter the server decimation market."
Caution: Contents under pressure
Comparing this to the browser battle isn't a good example. I doubt that MS will allow other OSs to run, thus VMWare will still have the market for running Non MS OSs on Win2k/XP. Plus, I doubt that MS will offer any functionality where you can run a MS OS on top of a non MS OS (although they may, since they'll still sell licenses in that situation), thus VMWare keeps that market too.
VMWare isn't going away. They just may take a hit on the running multiple Windows on Windows market.
I wonder who will be the first to lose their job when the .NET Server crashes, thereby taking down dozens of virtual machines.
I sometimes run VMWare on Linux, but that's just to play Ultima 7. Can't say Linux ever crashed down from under my Avatar. Win2K actually did, using the same VMware version.. ominous at best. I'm not touching it with a 10 foot pole!
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
'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?
This is most likely Microsoft's response to Solaris Containers which are expected to be shipping in Solaris 10. Of course, both of these are simply implementations of ideas pioneered by IBM with VM/CMS.
The VM approach makes a lot of sense even if you only plan to use it to run multiple copies of the native OS within them. The advantages are twofold. Firstly, it prevents one malfunctioning application from impacting other applications - even on Unix this is a serious problem, since one process can devour the CPU, memory, disk space, etc. Secondly, it allows resources to be redistributed or added on the fly, especially if your VM is seamless enough to span nodes.
What's wrong with this? Now maybe we can finally get a PlayStation emulator built into Windows.
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
I think MS's biggest problem is they try to clump too many things into one, that and a companies hierarchy can scale only so much. Trying to add something like this that is extraneous for the most part is just going to screw things up. It's not a criticism of MS, I don't think anyone could do what they are trying to do well. It's simply too much.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
they SELL windows liscenses??? Gee, and I thought the .txt file with the key in it was included with EVERY copy of windows...
who knew???
of coure, I better not let the BSA hear me say that, they might give me a merit badge in thievery!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
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.
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?
This is something that should be integrated with the operating system. I'm dying for Apple to dump money into MacOnLinux, port it to Mac OS X, and make it use a hardware optimized QuartzGL -> NativeOS' OpenGL pathway. Shouldn't even be hard for them. Samuel Rydh just doesn't have that much time in the day.
It'd make me much more likely to buy an Apple desktop, and I'd certainly shell out an extra $100 for the product itself
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ok, I have no problem with Microsoft buying Connectix. I do have a problem with them bundling it back into the Windows OS code. It seems like Microsoft's usual tactic to take over a market they see someone else do well in (but competitor, integrate into OS, etc). Who should I write to? Judge Kollar-Kotelly, FCC, my Congressional reps?
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
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.
Or perhaps Microsoft will do something good this time...
Schnapple
Given MS's history, I think it is a safe bet that this will be a _bad_ thing for VirtualPC Mac.
At the very least, I fully expect one to be required to purchase it with a Windows license.
I personally think VPC (all platforms) will go away entirely.
How did this get by the FTC?
VMWare couldn't ever become another netscape.
They sell their software, and people actually buy it.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It has been stated that VPC for Macintosh is now under the control of the Macintosh Business Unit. [MBU]
The biggest problem with this, of course, is the fact that Bill and Co. may just decide that the only application that the MBU needs to push out is VPC. This means no more Office X, no more native X applications, just run the Windows version of the app in VPC [slowly and painfully]
Oh man this is bad news. I wonder if the DOJ even cares.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
Johnny has 25 NT boxes and 19 of them have WVMS (windows virtual machine software) running on them. If 7 of those 19 are running WVMS within WVMS and 3 of those 7 are running Win2k Advanced Server, and the other 4 are running WinXP Pro, while the rest of the 19 are using WinME in the WVMS for backwards compatability issues. How many licenses will you need?
Bonus: How much will this cost including the inflation of the economy and of Microsoft's prices by the year 2004?
"Microsoft has responded to a need customers have asked for," said one source also familiar with the deal. "It will provide server consolidation, software distribution and better development, and they are moving to address that."
Obviously, these "customers" have never tried VMware which is one of the best killer apps I have used in a LONG time. I enjoy running W2K in VMware on my Mandrake box here at work. It nice to not have to reboot the entire PC when windows crashes. I can still do other pats of my job while the windows partition is booting. This is just another attempt by MS to own EVERYTHING that they don't already own. Hey MS, leave these guys alone you jerk offs!
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Obviously this is another ploy to charge absurd amounts of money for a JAWV (Just Another Windows Version).
If your goal is run many OS instances on the same hardware (in a production server environment), why don't you just get an IBM mainframe? They are MUCH more reliable than tinker-toy x86 servers, and IBM has made a name for themselves lately selling Linux on their mainframes.
Integrating virtual machine software with the Windows OS sounds like an answer to the wrong question.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It is kind of curious that Microsoft would choose Connectix's product for its virtualization. For those not familiar with it -- Connectix Virtual PC is a little more elaborate than VMware because it actually emulates the i386 CPU in software. This is why it works, for example, on a Macintosh, while VMware doesn't.
Now, it should be patently obvious that Microsoft doesn't want you running Linux-on-Windows, Windows-on-Linux, Windows-on-Mac, or anything other than Windows-on-Windows. So you have to wonder what they're up to, here.
When you don't have cross-OS stuff to worry about, why emulate the hardware? For that matter, why emulate a computer at all? For Linux-on-Linux applications, you probably won't choose VMware when you can instead run User Mode Linux -- it uses the hardware more efficiently, you can share filesystems between the host and virtuals using NFS, and it runs the host OS's native binaries. I would think Microsoft would prefer to go this route.
Or perhaps Microsoft has finally decided that Itanium is an ongoing disaster and they need an Intel exit strategy? Hmmm...
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it's just a totally, completely different product than VPC and VMWare, and people shouldn't be comparing them at all.
XP has been VERY stable for me. I've let it run for weeks nonstop while playing games, doing statistics work, and software development (full-blown Windows apps, not college console assignments). All the while, my RAM usage is reasonably low and the OS has never crashed.
That's not the same as saying IE doesn't crash. IE has crashed once or twice in a few weeks, but the OS keeps on chugging. Now, if only they'd remove that STUPID activation scheme...
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.
I saw the article already, but based upon M$ history and the announced integration of yet another application into already bloated and non-secure mess that Windows is, I foresee future news, with a familiar flavor. I.e. "this exploit allows anyone to take over any instance of blahblahblah".
Yeah, they also said they would continue to support Mac computers, but is this something you really want? I couldn't help, but notice a comment that 'they don't intend to kill the software'. Really... It's just one more sword to dangle over Apple, when Steve gets too uppity.
I don't see any long-term winners here, other than those selling Connectix's assets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Most of VMWare's money maker market is running *windows* 'server clients' in large data centers, regardless of what we would like to believe. ( face it, Microsoft still holds the majority of the computing market, at least for now )
I really don't think the 'workstation' version is making them a lot of money. its nice, but its pocket change in comparison to selling licenses for the 'big iron'.
If Microsoft attacks the ESX/GSX server market, in its typical fashion of 'forced migration', then it could hurt VMware greatly.
I expect citrix to be on the list of people to force out of business too, for similar reasons. ( yes its a different type of product, but similar in concept that its a 'data center' market that Microsoft will want to keep in-house )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But I know the answer: Zero. You just need one copy of NT Server, bought retail. Use copyright law instead of agreeing to any licenses, and consider the 50 instances to be fair use.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
He's finally working on a way to port the BSOD over to Linux and OSX for us!
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.
First let me say that I really like VMWare. I think they did a fabulous job - it's one of the better-engineered pieces of software that I've ever seen. All the times that I've had the pleasure to use it, it's worked for me without a hitch, despite the subtle complexity required to do an application like that well.
Furthermore, I hope that one day we'll see a real, meaningful government reform at Microsoft that puts them out of the business of "innovating" away various application markets.
My needs for VMs have been sparse. Most often I'm testing something (like an installer) that sprays stuff all over Windows, and it's just simplest to roll it back using the Undoable disk when the test is over. Or maybe I've got some code I want to check out that I consider really dangerous. Once in a while, if I'm stuck running Windows, but I need a Unix service on the network for a little while, I can raise a virtual linux server and keep it running as long as I need it. Far more convenient than hauling out another box.
I can see the attraction in virtual machines. You have so much more control. Bluescreens don't hang everything - only the particular virtual CPU they happen on. And VMWare's code is so freaking efficient, I can play counterstrike with a few of these virtual servers running, answering queries in the background. But it seems silly for virtual machines to become institutionalized in that role. To me, that's evidence of failure in the OS design. You have a reliability problem? Fix it in the OS. You have a control problem - something you wanted a VM and Undoable disks to solve? Add a feature to the filesystem. You have a security problem? Definitely an OS issue.
VMWare et al are great for ad hoc stuff and I think sooner or later most developers would be glad to have it around, but if you plan on running it all the time, in a server environment for instance, then it's just a big kluge. Your OS wasn't _designed_ to run inside itself... it's a big resource waste. Fix the problems in the OS. Compartmentalize, if that's what the environment demands. But don't do it this way. It's just goofy.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
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.
It's so that customers can run NT4-specific apps under future products like Windows Server 2003. See this eWeek article.
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...
...a pleasant user interface?
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
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.
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
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)
For all the Mac paranoid out there, here's another conspiracy theory that will undoubtedly turn up on the rumor sites.
;-)
Microsoft really wants to revive, sell, and support an improved version of Connectix RamDoubler for the latest revision of Mac OS 9. Heck, they might even make it into Microsoft RamTripler (MS Ram*er for short)
Connectix stopped selling RamDoubler and promised to do away with support for it in September 2003. But an killer utility like MS Ram*er will cement the last Mac holdouts to Mac OS 9 and their old hardware.
The conspiracy has widened!
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
The important question is 'Does anybody care?'. Linux runs just fine on PPC hardware, as do Open and NETBSD (FreeBSD on the way). More importantly a lot of *nix apps compile and run native on OS X. The only real reason for wanting to use an x86 emulator is to run an operating system which doesn't run on your hardware, and software compiled for another platform. i.e. Closed source software. i.e. Windows and windows apps. Does anybody actually use VirtualPC to boot x86 Linux? Are there enough closed source Linux apps (or ones which for one reason or another won't run on OS X / PPC Linux) that this is actually worth anyone's while?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...why MS wants this? It's a way to logically partition a server.
You have sysplex on IBM mainframes, now you will have the same capability on Wintel boxes.
It's not about any deficiencies in Windows as some have put forth. It's about moving further towards an enterprise-class server OS. The ability to partition a system into multiple logical systems is something that is done all the time in the mainframe world, and I suspect in the Unix world as well. As a matter of fact, the mainframe where I work has at least three Unix partitions running on it. These are essentially just virtual machines under the base OS (OS/390 I believe).
This is something MS needs as they continue the march to taking over the datacenter. They can't compete with the big boys with this type of technology, hence it is a perfect, if not utterly obvious, acquisition for them.
I personally find VMWare to be superior, but then my experience is not in the server space, it's on a desktop. Maybe this product is superior on a server, I don't know.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Do you remember the last time when Connectix sold it's Playstation emulator to Sony.
There was lots of talk about how good this would be, since Sony could cerate an official platform for selling PSX games to mac and pc users, since Sony was supposed to lose money on consoles this would make perfect sense. Of course, this did not happen, Sony chose to kill it instead.
Now, why do I get the feeling that the exact same thing will happen again?
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
Almost everyone here seems to be missing the point. This is not for home use. This is not intended for you, Joe Schmoe Windows at Home user to run other operating systems.
This is for the server market. We have an IBM mainframe at work that is currently running approximately 6 virtual machines. Not so that you can play a Windows game in Linux, but so that the mainframe can offer more services. Although I do believe that one of the virtual machines is a fairly standard installation of Linux of some sort, every other OS on the system is a very specifically tailored OS for a specific job. I'm not the administrator for this box, so I can't say too much. But I know that there are specific Tivoli UNIX versions installed, as well as an TSM/ADSM (backup) specific OS.
I think that THIS is what the article is getting at. This is not about you playing Tux Racer on your Windows box.
Sig.i>
Virtual PC is a nice piece of software that sells a fair number of copies, but doubt it's installed on more than 1% of all Macs. Killing or not killing it simply isn't a big deal either way in any Windows/Apple war.
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
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
take your heads off of your PCs and see this for what it could really be! yes, m$ wants to run PS 1 roms on the XBOX.
ok, well, maybe not, but its as good a reason as any for their purchase, unless they plan to fuse virtual server with windows just to make extra bloat. hmmm. i keep thinking back to Cartman's trapper keeper. microsoft insorping virtualization. . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
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.
Unless VMWare is planning on stagnating their product, branching out into tons of marginally related ventures, and fucking up standards implementations, I don't see them becoming a netscape.
While MS may have the foot-in-the-door advantage, I'm wondering if the fact that VMWare also supports Linux may help or not.
I know that personally, even though I run XP on my desktop, MSDN subscription, yadda yadda, I would only do something like GSX/ESX on a Linux box.
It will be interesting to see how this goes...I wish them the best of luck.
This is really fucked up because I just authorized the purchase of 179 VMware licenses for the company I work for. This purchase has gone through today. We paid a ridiculous amount of money. I really hope that VMware doesn't go the way of the dodo or that's what will happen to my job. Shit.
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!
It was going to run Windoze insanley fast!
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.