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Microsoft Providing Virtual Server Free
liliafan writes "In an effort to gain a market majority over VMware Microsoft announced it is giving Virtual Server away for free, additionally they will provide customer support for Linux. In a related move VMware have opened their partition file format to the community, aggressive and suprising moves in the virtualisation market."
Unless I'm missing something here, this action on Microsoft's part is reminiscent of their "response" to Netscape when Microsoft finally recognized they had fallen way behind in an important market.
And, unless I'm missing something again, I think Microsoft still qualifies as a legally defined "monopoly", and this looks like leveraging their monopoly to unfairly skew market forces and competition.
And, unless I'm mistaken, this should be illegal.
(As an aside, interestingly enough, I was surprised to find Microsoft's virtual server technology STILL does not offer hypervisor services... to give some perspective as to how far behind that puts them in "getting it", I worked on virtualized VM boxes on IBM 360 mainframes in school back in the mid-70s! These systems were implemented with hypervisor. Wow!)
(Caveat: For those of you with home systems with XP Home Edition, this virtual server doesn't come free -- you'll need to flip for the $100 XP Professional upgrade.)
(Caveat II: I don't always completely trust stories from the Register as I find them a little over-the-top in their anti-Microsoft rhetoric. However I was able to verify the Microsoft Virtual Server IS available for free download.)
I'm guessing it isn't gonna be free as in Free.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I wonder if they will ship a slightly degraded version, much as VMware is doing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately, Xen hasn't learned one of the prime lessons of history: partnering with Microsoft is merely the first step towards being put out of business by Microsoft.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
More like desperate. They're only doing this because Xen's eating their lunch.
No, it's because the Virtualization market is heating up. And it's likely VMWare that's causing Microsoft to sweat, not Xen, or any F/OSS alternative.
You used to see this back in the day when local, and ma' and pa' shops roamed the earth. For instance, one bakery would have a monopoly in the area, when a new one would pop up, and start undercutting the other's prices. Then they'd retaliate, and you'd end up with a flying storm of lowering prices, until one of them were forced out of business.
At this point, the price would be rock bottom, and the winner, would gradually increase prices until they were making a good profit again, but generally it worked out well for the community that was shopping there.
Of course, the whole problem comes in that to startup a bakery you don't need billions of dollars and years of development to produce your product. Microsoft is now sitting in a practically unchallengable monopoly position. When monopolies hit this point, it's my opinion that controls should be leveraged to ensure that they're not gouging their captive audience.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
I am using VMware server now.. and its great..
All the work I do; making VMs, API based automation, etc.. works great on a Linux or Windows host.
Why would you want to run VMs on only a Windows host when VMware gives you choice?
and looking at the open source software world, microsoft finally hit on the favourite price that consumers want
Most likely the "free" Virtual Server will require Windows 2003 Server which is very expensive. "free" VMWare Server is $0 running on GNU/Linux.
/. did cover it.
2 0216
/. the world must be coming to an end.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/03/13
Damn I am defending
I LIKE PICKLES!
VMWare Player and now Server have been free for a while. So in all actuality, MS is just adjusting costs to market normals.
-]Phreak Out[-
Why? I don't understand the motivation to switch just for switching's sake. VMWare Server was announced as a free product before Virtual Server. If you're running ESX and plan on moving to Virtual Server because it's free then you also plan on losing a lot of functionality.
If you've already got an infrastructure built in VMWare, how does it make sense to spend the labor leaving it for no good reason?
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Solution: if you can't get drivers for your hardware, use VMWare to abstract the Windows drivers to Linux. My wireless card looks like a regular 100mbps Ethernet card to Linux, which needless to say works great. With a decent processor and 2gigs of ram, I'm very, very happy with FC4 under VMWare at 1900x1600.
If there's one thing that Windows is unbeatable at, it's adapting proprietary drivers to Linux!
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
While I really like VMware and think its better than MS product, the MS product is catching up. The free part was done by VMware first and MS is simply responding. Dont forget that MS does support virtualization. If you look at their new licensing for 2003 R2 they support 4 server licenses for 1 server license purchased on each physical machine. This is a very good deal! So now you can purchase one server license for each 'physical' machine and run 4 vm's on each one (or combination of).
The supporting linux simply means that there is default settings for linux enviornments much like vmware and if you call MS because you are having a virtualization issue or driver issue in linux on Virtual Server they will work with you on solving it.
This again is nice, because you can get the flexibility of linux running on the same box as Windows. So you get the nice domain integration and AD security model (or easy anyway) and you can still drop a linux VM on top of it for file/print or to do some other tasks. It looks like MS idea here is to simply say run anything virtualization product or software you want but run it under the Windows o/s. To be honest, I have dozens of clients running 2000/2003 server as the host and several VM's in vmware. The boxes untouched and vlan'ed (you can vlan the host and not the guest) are very very stable.
I don't consider it a bad thing, if the only "good" thing that comes of VMWare's offering causes Microsoft to release its server as free also.
Well if it was a Korean form giving away DVD players for free, or,
an Indian giving away steel cheap. It would be (and is) considered illegal
dumping. So whay not for software?
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I've been an admin of 12 ESX servers for 2 years now. I would say this a very good move for the market as frankly VMware, namely ESX, has been sitting stagnet for some time, something that Microsoft is normally called out for. I'm hoping that the battle to one-up their competitor results in some accelerated innovation in this market.
The new VS2005 R2 has some very interesting features such as iSCSI and 64 bit support. VMware can start making rapid updates to Server to compete and roll up the good stuffs into ESX for the datacenter workhorses.