Slashdot Mirror
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?
http://nerdfortress.com/
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.
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.