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Microsoft Plans Hypervisor for Longhorn
ninjee writes "Microsoft reiterated plans to launch its own Windows-based 'hypervisor' software for running multiple operating systems. Bob Muglia, senior vice president in the Windows Server Division, said on Tuesday that the software will be 'built directly in Windows and will allow companies to virtualize multiple operating systems.' "
I doubt that they would do that because if they did, you could always remove the Windows, run the UNIX natively ( which is really what you should probably do in the first place ), but Microsoft will undoubtedly add some "feature" that will require Windows. Personally I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would want to use this, but I'm sure by the time the Microsoft PR machine gets through with it managers everywhere will be wanting to load Windows Longhorn so they can try out Linux.
TFA says that MS's rival in this area is shaping up to be a product called Xen. I will humbly admit I've never heard of Xen, and TFA says it has a lot of support. But isn't this VMware's market too? Not sure how much market share VMware currently has, but it's been a very solid product in my experience.
Yeah, yeah, VMware is not free (as in beer), and it is closed source (AFAIK). Nor is it built in to the OS. But I think it has strong support and probably a large customer base.
Comments?
http://nerdfortress.com/
Are Microsoft admitting a mainstream demand for coexistance between non-microsoft operating systems on the same pc, and even demand for alternative operating systems by including these features, or are they hedging their bets to become a good 'host' OS, so as to ensure users stay primarily on Windows but virtualize other OS's to access their strengths.
It doesnt immediately seem clear from the article how other operating systems will be permitted, and it could be the case that the software approves what operating systems will boot within it. I wonder how this development will affect VMware, as it is one of the few end-user virtualization software companies left given Microsoft's acquisition of Connectix and Virtual PC
Business Voyeur
The problem that you have with Microsoft and virtualization is licensing.
Do you have to buy a new $800 server license every time you create a new VM? If not, is someone going to bother to tell the online activation system about this?
Let's say you have an ISP, and you want to sell hosting with IIS and MS-SQL to your customers. It would be great if you could use virtualization software to partition the machine -- it would make it easier to manage and more secure.
All the tools you need to do this now are available -- VMWare will do it.
But you can't, because you'd go broke. You have to buy a copy *per customer*.
Meanwhile, I can buy an account at a vps provider (mine is linode.com) for $20/month, and run my own web server and database engine just fine.
They have to address the licensing, or it won't fly.
Say what you will about the evil empire, but this is a good move for them and not really surprising considering their acquisition of Virtual PC (connectix I think). The VPC software while not the best on the market, is extremely useful. On my windoze XP Laptop, I have different Virtual PC images for Oracle, SQL Server 2005 Beta, Redhat Enterprise Linux, etc. The images do take up quite a bit of space, but since disk drive are affordable, I only have to run a minimal XP installation and only need to worry about upgrades when the latest and greatest service pack comes out. When I'm done with a project, I just shut down the VM, when I'm done with the technology, I delete or archive the VM and keep a clean base OS. Integrating a virtual machine seems like a logical move to me.
K
Windows 2000 Server, for really old apps.
Windows 2003 Server, for old apps.
A few isolated copies of Longhorn Server, so when one crashes it doesn't take out the others.
Actually, if Longhorn is to be a nice, fast, secure, modern OS it needs to be released without all the crap that ensures compatability with older versions of Windows dragging it down. They obviously can't just drop all old software, so virtualising the old Windows versions (just like Apple did with Classic under OSX) would be the way to go.
Alternatively, Longhorn will still be bogged down with all the old shit and this will just be a half assed attempt to embrace, extend and exterminate other operating systems. We'll see.
Multiple instances of the same OS, of course.
Imagine a separate mail server, web server, terminal server, etc. all running on the same hardware, with support for migrating -- live! -- any particular OS instance over to different hardware (on the same SAN) if you're so inclined.
Well, I'd hope they could provide that latter feature -- Xen does.
Where's the -1 Paranoid moderation when you need it? Or should that be a +1?
:
I want my hypervisor to be a "meta-operating system" whose sole purpose in life is to mediate between real hardware and virtual hardware and run and schedule the virtual machines.
It's perfectly fine for a hypervisor to be based on an NT or Linux kernel, but I don't want it to have anything user interface except what is needed to control the VMs, configure the underlying hardware, and store the VM settings and drive images. No explorer.exe or calc.exe for example, and for certain no iexplore.exe or word.exe. A locked-down apache.exe or iis.exe to allow remote-control that serves up web pages to VMs or, optionally (disabled by default) a system-administrator's box elsewhere on the net is acceptable. There's no reason the binaries for a hypervisor can't be burned into ROM or stored on a read-only drive or CD, with just the VM setup files and disk images writable. Need to fix a bug? Flash your ROM or change CDs.
Heck, Microsoft could make some real money selling a Linux/Unix/Apple-friendly hypervisor to hardware OEMs for $10 a pop, then sell guest licenses for $BIG_BUCKS per concurrent-use license. Enforcing concurrent uses on the same machine or LAN shouldn't be a problem, Novell did it in the '80s with serial-number-checking - if you put two instances of the same serial number on the same LAN Bad Things happened.
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Damn these human-detectors are hard to read. Where's the "play audio" button?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I still fondly remember my old Commodore Amiga, running Mac OS, Windows, AmigaDOS, and UNIX simultaneously on separate pull-down screens. You could share files and even cut-and-paste between OS's. *sigh*
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I think that real threat is to this is yet to come. In the not to far off future (2-5 years) I can well imagine that as the amount of cores on a single CPU die increase AMD/Intel will add this functionality at the hardware level (how do IBM manage LPARS at present anyone?) with BIOS type hooks etc.
As an aside I would be very interested in the pro's and con's of the Xen type virtualisation method versus the VMware ESX type method, especially regarding inter-image security.
Be alert, the world needs more lerts
You know that x86 processors don't support full virtualization very well? True virtualization software like VMWare does it with a performance hit, which Xen evades. Thus, one can argue that Xen is better option than true virtualization.
And now for something completely different...
People from L4Ka have built a pre-virtualizer, which allows to easily compile virtualizable kernels from unmodified source, which can be then run on Xen or L4Ka microkernel.
Pre-virtualization with Compiler Afterburning
Oh, and there are quite a few similarities with the MS hypervisor:
* drivers run in a guest OS, not in the VMM itself
* guests can be ported to the VMM the achieve better performance (yes, MS are doing it. They call it "enlightenments". Hmmm. Doesn't Zen have something to do with enlightenment?)
* special VMM virtual devices for better performance
These characteristics are also shared by IBM's POWER hypervisor on pSeries.
Showing my age by mentioning OS/2, I know, but they did everything that they could to cripple OS/2 from running Windows 3.1 in a virtual environment. I can't see any reason why they would not do the reverse.
Honestly, though, this looks more like an attack against WINE. If you run WINE within Linux, you don't need a license for Windows. If you run UNIX within Windows, you still need to have a Windows license. You'll get the same effect - Windows and Linux on the same system - either way; however, there is money for Microsoft with this new scheme of theirs whereas there is no money for Microsoft when running WINE under Linux.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Microsoft is just entertaining the latest buzzword. Next year it might as well be kernel checkpointing for uninterrupted failover of windows computing clusters.
- Roey
The article wrote: "Xen doesn't yet support Windows, however." Wrong, wrong, wrong! 1. Xen is an open standard, so any OS can modify their kernel to run on Xen. It's not a matter of which OS is supported by Xen, it's whether that OS is willing to support Xen. 2. At the early stages of Xen, there was a modified windows XP that can run on Xen. But soon it was withdrawn for licensing concerns. Since the sources of windows XP is not publicly available, nobody can modify it and make it run on Xen. So looks like Xen is bound to compete with windows in the future. I wonder how fair this competition is, given that MS may never make windows xen-compatible.
Actually, Windows XP can already do this, sort of. If you right click any EXE (or shortcut to one) you can select Compatibility and choose your old OS to pretend to be. When the process is then running, you'll see it as a subprocess of "wowexec.exe", where "wow" stands for "windows on windows".
"DOS" programs run in a virtual machine now as well.
This feature in XP may give us a look ahead at what Microsoft might plan, as far as cleaning up the API in general, but still supporting old programs if they really really have to.
The only way you can say this is by being so utterly myopic about the software industry that you have absolutely no clue about what is happening in any other.
Monsanto is engineering agricultural dependence on their products. In a far more insidious way than Microsoft is. There is absolutely no comparison.
Does anyone else find the old-style Windows 95 window/icons better looking than the XP/Longhorn styles? I sure as hell do. I miss that clean, crisp, un-themeable look.