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Microsoft to Support Linux in Virtual Server
zaxios writes "Techworld is reporting that Microsoft has announced support for running Linux on their virtualization software, Virtual Server 2005. From the article: '[Microsoft] can't compete against VMware without support for other operating systems.' Perhaps the significance of this is that Microsoft has acknowledged Linux as an OS people might want to use, which seems an upgrade from its previous status as a communist cancer."
Enjoyed my fun little christmas hoax - help me do it for real in 2005! ;-)
which seems an upgrade from its previous status as a communist cancer
This was said five and four years ago (respectively). Sheesh - you know companies can change mindsets....Even a stone can change with time.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
In the post-Microsoft world I welcome our communist Linux overlords.
Microsoft is supporting communism AND cancer!? Well I knew they were evil but this is definitely a new low. For shame, Microsoft, for shame.
Does this mean I can finally run Linux under Wine?
Or Microsoft wants to be able to go "hey why switch to Linux, you can do the same thing on Windows, whats up with you silly commie?"
I like muppets.
make them run in a virtual server...
Freedom is strength, Ignorance is peace, War is slavery.
Seems that it would be the other way....if you 'needed' windows for something...you'd fire it up on top of Linux (or other Unix type OS)....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
it means you can run Wine on Windows.
You need to keep in mind that Microsoft is a very large company and each department is so large that it is almost like a company within its self. So if it is bad for the Windows Server team that the Virtual Server team has done this, well too bad. The Virtual Server team needs to keep their product competitive and they are just telling it as it is; they are an x86 system virtualizer and need to support popular x86 platforms, if they didn't then they deserve to die off.
This is no different than when Microsoft released an Office for Mac. Naturally the Windows platform teams and managers didn't much care for that but Office saw it as an opportunity. The people doing the name calling are the ones within Microsoft that are competing against Linux not the ones that couldn't care less either way or want to port their projects to Linux to improve their customer base.
In my opinion, when we see a dominant Linux platform (e.g. desktop environment, tool set etc) then we will also see a copy of Microsoft Office released. Microsoft will follow the market with most of its products.
...if Linux'll run.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Originally submitted without MS bashing as:
Hell Freezes Over-Thursday April 21, @08:37AM -Rejected
When you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
This is for server virtualization, so it makes some "sense" in this context. It's a choice at least. For my money though it would surely be VMWare if I was going to virtualize a few test servers around the office.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I wonder who will be the first one to run:
- Linux Running VMware running...
- Windows Running VirtualServer2005 running...
- Linux Running WMware running...
You get the idea..What he means is that virtualization will become a mission-critical function within the enterprise allowing customers to leverage their investments in legacy systems while enabling information technology staff to expand development using innovative technologies. MS is striving to develop best of breed technologies to provide its cusomers better TCO and ROI when compared with competing products.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
"I don't see the value proposition in Linux" is the kind of mindset likely to change within five years.
Asserting that the GPL is cancerous and free software advocates are communists is not.
The simple truth is, Microsoft (or, at least, Bill Gates) likely never truly believed either of those things. They said them because they thought that if people believed it, it would confer a business advantage for them. For another example of this kind of behavior, I refer you towards Bill's obvious flip-floppery on the issue of software patents.
Now that Microsoft has given the thumbs up to Linux on Virtual PC, I can slaughter one of the big objections people have to moving web servers off Windows: the developers don't have a Linux box on their desktop. Now they can install Virtual PC and set up a test environment there, which kills the problem and might get some Windows web servers off the net.
Not that I have a problem with Windows, but it makes a really *bad* web server.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
no, anything but the Gandhi quote!
Linux is... a cancer. And we... are the cure.
Interesting. Your "TFA" points to a story at Mithuro about China and Taiwan, while your quote includes many important PageRank keywords like Windows, Ballmer, virtual, Linux and technology.
Nice try at boosting your Google Rank. I'm not buying it.
This wouldn't work. Everyone would point at VMware with Linux running correctly. So, anyone interested in emulating Linux would ditch the MS virtual PC, and go for VMware instead.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
(from Webster online)
Etymology: French, from saboter to clatter with sabots, botch, sabotage, from sabot
This affair reminds me of the DR-DOS and Windows 3.1. All M$ has to do is to "support it" and quietly make sure what "support" they provide is broken in some strange way, and place the blame on Linux to [I]sabotage[/I] its adaptation. This way at a later date they can make the claim "users have made their choice. Linux is out."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Virtual PC has supported Linux as a guest for ages already, long before Microsoft bought them out. What would be more interesting is if they brought back support for OS/2 as a host OS, a feature which they immediately removed after buying the company out. Of course I'd expect nothing else from Microsoft, but oh well, maybe Microsoft still feels threatened by OS/2?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Wouldn't running Linux on top of Windows be kind of like stacking bricks on jello?
hack a day
Windows inside Linux inside Windows inside MacOSX.
So instead of one cross-platform standards-based language embodying write-one-run-anywhere, we do it the long way around.
Yeah, this is a really great idea. "Our new PCs from Dell can run six different operating systems inside each other right out of the box. We call it the Mental Whiplash System."
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The difference is that Linux is not just another competitor like Apple, Sun, Adobe, whatever. Linux is not another company, it represents and entirely new (re-hashed?) philosophy surrounding computer technology. As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). Then corporate America swoops in, like always, and takes these concepts to market. And life is good? Sure, why not, companies move in to innovate and compete, Apple is born, Microsoft is born, and everthing is good? Well, no, not this time. Microsoft, through their tremendous monopolistic power, begins to shape our philosophies surrounding software and how it should be implemented. There is a lot of history around UNIX, Novell, Microsoft, etc. that some of the older computer-folks could do a much better job of explaining...
Fast-forward to the 90's. Suddenly the WWW enters public awareness. Suddenly computers become like American politics; you get two choices and both suck. (I'm sorry, but early Macs sucked - I love new Macs though.) Then I learn about this thing called Linux. I wander over to the CS library and grab Red Hat 2. Huh? The library? Free software? How good can this be?
Fast forward to 2005. Windows XP is now asking me to "validate my genuine microsoft product" before downloading the latest security update in a tidle wave of security fixes that can only be released by Microsoft because the source is guarded like the recipe for Coke. In the other room a native 64 bit Linux OS compiled from scratch (I love you too Gentoo) is humming away will oodles of software written by people from former Soviet Satellite countries, India, China, South America, Europe, Mexico... Meanwhile I'm being forced to run Winblows inside a virtual machine (VMWare really is a nice program) because the American Chemical Soceity and Cambridge Soft have succombed to the power of the Gates and gone out of their way to write software that won't even work with WINE. Then they require me to submit to their journals using said Microsoft-only software. They actually have the stones to charge $1200 per license for this software, in what is essentially a scam to pirate grant money. That just isn't right!
Linux is really the flagship for the battle between freedom of information and big-business' inability to cope with change. Open source software has problems yes, but it sets up a playing field where 16 year olds from Turkmenistan can compete with one of the largest corporations in the world. There is a sea change in that is flattening out the World thanks to the wonders of the computer age. The Army of Penguins is ready to leave fipper-shaped welts on the backsides of the mighty Empire and Slashdot readers want to be on the front lines, ears to the ground, sharpening our beaks, er swords, er motherboards..?
Oh, and you know they're running scared when they trot out the old "socialism is communism" argument. Pfff, by their definition labor unions and organized sports are communist.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Longhorn's late. Yukon's late. Ballmer, the deadline for April Fool's jokes are April 1st.
[ducks]
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Ignoring the age of the quote I see no reason why a company can't provide support in their product for a product they dislike or compete against. Hell, you've been able to import non-Microsoft file formats into their applications for years.
Especially if it's going to mean that they're actually going to have a more competitive product or bring them more money.
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We just started using VMWare GSX Server on Win2003 and it is both a cool concept and thusfar has been working really well.
For us the idea is we have a half-dozen 1U boxes that are getting old and need to run basically stand-alone environments; they don't play well with other software environments. Budgetarily replacing the 1U boxes with new 1U boxes that meet the hardware standards is ridiculously expensive _and_ a complete waste of disk, CPU and I/O capacity, not to mention power, heat, etc. The current boxes (dual P3 700s) sit at near-idle all the time and don't have much, if any, local storage or I/O demands.
As it stands right now, we have 4 virtual systems (1 freebsd, 3 win2k) running on a dual P4/3.2 xeon server using 1-10 percent of CPU capacity. We have about 6 more systems we'll migrate over to this environment and I seriously doubt we'll get beyond 20% CPU utilization. Plus we can easily clone some a template server and have a test or eval box going in about 5 minutes. You can also snapshot a virtual disk so that you can rollback to the checkpoint point (great for upgrades or testing), or just clone the entire virtual disk.
It works best with systems that have low I/O and CPU demands or bursty demands; I wouldn't do it with systems that have high I/O or CPU demands. You can dedicate physical LUNs to VMs, but it kills some of the flexibility in exchange for performance.
For the wags who criticize me for not running it on Linux or using their high-buck ESX product: We looked at ESX, and management of the ESX system we thought was excessively convoluted and the performance for our needs not meaningfully different. We have no problems with stability on 2003, either, plus we're a FreeBSD shop, not a Linux shop, and we didn't want to BS around trying to run GSX under FreeBSD, as it wasn't a supported host OS.
I figure this is way more the future (since it is the past on OS/390) of computing than blades, especially once its merged with SAN virtualization. Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization. I also think that eventually MS will merge virtualization completely into the OS, and will license you on total CPUs and total concurrent images.
MS Press release, 2007:
"New distribution format makes the OS irrelevant"
"they are also going to license their virtual disk format royalty free"
Now, if MS at some point included VPC on every desktop OS -don't laugh, it could happen, say five years from now- think of the possibilities.
An "application" could be comprised of a very minimalist custom OS + only the specific functionality for the application needed. With a virtualized PC, you've got a completely standardized hardware platform, although one that is hardly performance oriented. For instance, the older VirtualPC used what, a virtualized 2-d video chipset without much "hardware" acceleration. You could package up an entire single-application Linux system in a very optimized disk file. The O/S need never be seen by the user.
The next step will be customized vitual hardware+driver modules for VPC plugin, consisting of vitualized higher performance video chipsets, RAID, etc. Instead of "DLL" hell, ten years from now we'll have some sort of virtual hardware hell as the single simple standardized vitural hardware platform expands...
you get all the disadvantages of Linux with the advantages of massive downtime, unrealeased patches to Windows Server, and you get to pay tons of cash!
Cool!
Um, what was the question?
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