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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.' "
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.