Slashdot Mirror
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."
That does it, Slashdot. April Fools is OVER.
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!
microsoft has also started offering its own proprietary air for free, in an attempt to muscle out the Earth's atmosphere from its traditional strength position in the marketplace.
And what will their standard answer be? "Upgrade to Windows Vista"?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
OK, I changed my mind.
Have you read my blog lately?
Same goes for CPU-based stuff, like Virtual-PC. They just don't run Windows properly. The thing is, since Microsoft has the only operating system out there that is largely, or even majority, undocumented, it makes sense for them to provide the virtualization software. That way they can make it work on their own undocumented platform, while using other platforms' APIs to permit easy access to Linux, OSX, etc.
This is a win-win-win for everyone!
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
This will enable use by all developers, software vendors and projects and includes open licensing compatible with those operating under open source licenses such as the GPL.
Just how compatible must the license be be (I imagine a BSD type is pushing it)? Also, do they mean GPL 2 or 3?
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
Must better coverage over at this blog. Check out VMWare President Diane Greene's blog.
And here is direct link to the Microsoft download page that requires registration.
Direct link to the 32bit version: here. (no reg required)
Direct link to the 64bit version: here. (no reg required)
Happy downloading.
When you gave away MS Internet Explorer for free, many of us fell for it. Now we know better.
Is this yet another expample of Microsoft stifling innovation. Some had already mention the parallels to Netscape where Microsoft essentially knock them out of business witht the free release of IE. Then, let IE development stagger till it became riddle with holes and bugs. I worry that they are doing the same thing in virtualization.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
You are comparing OS level emulators to virtual machines. The competition in this space is VMWare. Using this sort of software, you actually NEED Windows. You boot up a VM and then proceed to install an OS just like a real machine. This is massively unlike Wine and is somewhat different from VPC too.
Also, remember, VM products aren't designed to run the latest and greatest games or something. They are designed to fill two niches, extremely secure testbeds for software where you want crashes to be easy to recover and server virtualization where one machine imitates several.
Shit, why are you bothering me? _I_ knew that.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Microsoft sees VMWare as their enemy because they are banking cash today. (Thou shalt have no other vendors other than Microsoft) However Xen is probably the bigger threat. And I'd say they understand that as well, otherwise they could have done the one thing that would have made an instant difference.
Remember that when Xen was a research project at a university they had XP running in Xen because they had a source license for XP. However since said license didn't allow actually releasing anything derived from knowledge gained from that source they couldn't release the XP client drivers. Had Microsoft removed that restriction or, even better, provided Microsoft supported drivers Xen would likely crush VMWare in a few short years.
Democrat delenda est
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.
I wonder now that it's OSS, now it can be thrown into the kernel and possibly be mounted like any other fs? Is this possible? Thanks.
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
Note that VMWare is also giving away their Server product for free. For some reason, Slashdot hasn't been willing to run this story, even though it's important.
It's a new product, still in beta... about equivalent to the GSX Server. They just released Beta 2 either today or yesterday. It's a _really_ good product. The current keys they're giving away expire, but they say the final version will also be free-as-in-beer.
Basically, it'll do everything Workstation will, plus it allows you to see the consoles of virtual machines that are on another computer. It also gives you a fairly rudimentary web-based control panel, wherein you can start, stop, or restart particular VMs. You can also set up user accounts, and restrict access to particular machines appropriately. It's not ISP-class, but it'd be damn useful for QA teams or suchlike.
Where is VirtualPC different in this? Virtual Server *is* VPC, MS bought Connectix and changed the name of the product... VPC is an virtualization environment where you install windows (and other OSs), so you need windows to install it, I don't see the difference.
If you say Microsoft's Virtual Server is considerably worse than VPC was, then I can agree there's a difference, and this is not just MS bashing. I've tried both, and know windows admins that have tried both, and we all rue the day that Connectix got bought, because VPC was (and still is, amazingly enough) a much better application than Virtual Server, in speed, stability and compatibility.
It's ironic that MS is basically killing a good product much in the way that IBM did when they bought Lotus. There are things that just shouldn't be bought by big companies, they have too many conflicting interests and not enough vision and purpose to carry out a truly good thing.
shana
It seems like a good time for VMWare to open up it's disk format, now that Qemu has it completely reverse-engineered. :)
dogs and cats where found living together while mass hysteria ensued.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The first hit is always free. =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Breakfast served all day!
a lot of the ms strategy involves people not being exposed to linux and being able to make a comparison. i would beleive that the last thing microsoft really wants is for someone running xp pro to fire up a free version of vpc and running linux to see what is looks like and how it works.
so i don't understand.
eric
Let's not forget that the battle here is for control of the enterprise use of windows. Before the wave of virtualization software, if you were a sysadmin on a company, you used whatever OS was handed down to you from up above, mostly, of course, windows.
:p
Multinationals institute a standard OS that sysadmins are stuck with, and you just can't justify changing OS's on anything unless it's critical for your business that you do it, and that's a tough sale indeed if any MS representative can go to the boss and say that what you want to do can be done in windows (note I'm not saying that it's done as well as with other OS's, just that it *can* be done, MS has enough software to cover all bases).
So now with virtualization software you don't have to dump the OS... you just run another one inside it, so the sysadmin doesn't have to justify big expenses and has the advantage of showing that another OS can work better on any given task. So suddenly the field is open again, one can sidetrack the *official* platform and increase productivity (= $$$).
And you know what, the boss listens when a sysadmin says "we don't have to spend that much more $$$, and we can improve our efficiency on this and this if we just run a linux on this box and have it do X. It's still running windows so we're not breaking any official company rules here, our objectives (= $$$) will be met, and we can drop the annual MS fees"
So now MS has a conundrum on it's hands... suddenly the monopoly is endangered in the worst possible way; big companies escaping it's grasp (i.e. not buying the top dollar server apps it sells). So what does it do? Buys a virtualization software so it can launch it's own platform and try and prevent the admins from escaping. VirtualPC was very good at virtualizing non-windows systems, Virtual Server is not that good at it. VPC was very sleek, VS big and bulky, so that admins who try it out won't be too tempted to run lots of stuff on it.
In all of this, the Mac is really not the target. The battle front is not at the Mac, as far as VMWare and MS are concerned. The virtualization market might be the biggest battle for control of the admin that we've seen ever, and might just be the one that finally breaks MS, especially because it comes at a time when MS is being dragged down by it's own sheer weight, and it's not the agile, fast-to-the-market company it once was.
One can only hope...
shana
I've been studying these technologies for a while now. It's only recently that processor power has reached the point that an x86 powered computer had the processor performance to overcome the inherent design limitation historically imposed by design decisions made by IBM and subsequently Microsoft and Intel that can make use of all the power available in the processors themselves. For a multitude of reasons (off topic) this power is irrelevant to most home users and business users of pcs. More importantly this power is irrelevant to the majority of server purposes. It's well known that most servers used in business are running at much less than 20% utilization levels. And that's with old boxes. This means that buying a new server with current technology results in a box running at levels as low as 5 or 10% utilization. Why bother? Enter virtualization. With virtualization a single box can replace 4, 7 16, 20 or more servers. Not that good for IntelDellIBMHP etc, but great for you and me. Less electricity needed, less cables, less everything. The only factor holding this back is licensing costs. If you can reduce those costs too, wow. Microsoft allows a single $4K Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition license to support up to four instances. If you don't have to pay extra for virtualization software, then the price starts to be very competitive with supported Linux licensing. More importantly it makes virtualization a standard way of doing things. The real question is what happens to the open source community when the development of free tools like Xen loose their support fee value when competing with a more mature platform that costs the same thing. We're not there yet, but it will happen. In a year or three.
True, you currently can't run Windows in Xen; however, both AMD and Intel will be offering updated processors with enhanced virtualization instructions that will allow Xen (and other VMs) to run Windows in a VM much more easily. So, IMHO, both VMWare and Virtual Server are trying to be proactive here and entrench themselves before the $0 VM from Xen becomes a real option.
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.
I know, I know, we've all heard it before, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist... but for what? Bundling a free (as in beer) web browser with their OS qualifies as taking advantage of their monopoly?
People get upset every time Microsoft gives something away for free, always claiming it pushes other companies out of the market. Newsflash: Netscape gave away its browser; so did Microsoft. Where is the "market"?
Mindshare != market.
Or are you effectively saying a company can NEVER compete with an OSS project, because the OSS project will always be free while it's "unfair" for the company to give something away from free? I am unclear what standard you wish to impose. Answer me this: if a company (Microsoft) wants to make a product, which has free open-source or otherwise equivalents in the market, is it anticompetitive practice to also release a free one?
Didn't Nostrodamus predict this?
Virtualization is the future and helps us get to that goal of utility computing. Its not too surprising that Microsoft has done this, nor was this the first drop in price for their server virtualization product.
What is surprising is Microsoft lagging behind VMWare big time when it comes to server virtualization. When I spoke to a VMWare sales rep, he said the money comes from ESX (which costs $3750 a pop), not GSX or the workstation products. People buy ESX because they want the following (I know this because the company I work for evaluated the different VM products):
-Faster VM performance
-Support (anyone that works in a datacenter will tell you that support is always necessary)
-Features (virtual center, virtual SMP, vmotion)
No other product stands up to ESX when it comes to the datacenter environment, and thats the market Microsoft needs to go after. The midrange virtualization products like GSX or virtual server are used for developer testing or in QA, but not for running production services (at least not in the big environments). This move by Microsoft won't make much of a dent in VMWare's share (at least where the money is) so its not a huge step.
I love ESX, and one thing that I hope will make ESX better is Microsoft putting pressure on VMWare to not get too comfy and to constantly innovate because the company's future depends on it. I just hope it doesn't have the same outcome as IE vs NS.
First off, this is a good thing. As someone else said most new servers are running around 5-10% utilization. In fact we have a server at work dedicated to running virtual servers that is running 7 under MS Virtual Server 2003 R2 64-Bit, and it hums along at about 15%. Our only limiting factor is RAM and hard drive space, but more so the RAM. Most new services we are looking at implementing we mock up in a virtual server before even considering putting it on a host machine. If we like the way it runs in the virtual server we often decide to just leave it in a virtual server, extra RAM for our virtual server box is cheaper than a whole new box.
Now for the downside. As nice as this is, I see this as a ploy for MS to sell more copies of Windows, even with them releasing the Linux tools. If I was in their shoes, sure give Virtual Server away, the ones losing are the hardware vendors.
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.
I'e been using QEMU which is GLP'd and does a few things neither of the above products do. However I have to admit that VMWare is slick. Good interface and easy to install.
I had the opportunity to conduct a month long virtualization pilot which, among other things, evaluated Virtual Server vs VMWare, and, Virtual Server surprisingly came out on top.
a) Virtual Server is 64 on a 64 bit OS, if you want it, but VMWare was only available in 32 bit.
b) Virtual Server, running the application as VMWare, actually ran those apps 10% faster than did VMWare. Our application pegs the CPU for several hours, and so we felt that this was as good as test as any.
c) Virtual Server was easier to set up and use.
d) For the price difference, you could get another few datablades.
Your mileage may very, but the bottom line is, until you download Virtual Server and compare it to VMWare, don't believe the hype about performance, because, it may well be hype.
This is my sig.
Ignoring the obvious VMWare comparison, this is really good for the Microsoft shops. Many shops use Virtual Server, but there are very few tools for working with the partition file format. On several occassions, I've wanted to copy a file to a virtual server without booting it up. In some cases, it was a server that couldn't boot up. It's really quite funny to insert a virtual Linux CD into a Microsoft Virtual Server so that you can access the hard drive. Plus, there's no good tools for building and creating virtual server images, which makes it nearly useless for enterprise testing or debugging.
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.
I know someone who does this. He's mainly a Win user, but occasionally needs *nix apps. For him Linux-in-a-box is a better choice than multiboot since he can just pop the VM open, do his work and close it without leaving his default environment (after all, he does do his regular stuff like mail under Windows). He doesn't try to be a power user and he has not had many unexplicable system failures, so he's quite happy with Windows.
;)
Although this is only until I can talk him into a Mac, of course.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
AOL assimilated them.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
ESX is an OS customized for virtualization. Its actually Linux but with a modified kernel used to run their hypervisor (the hypervisor is what gives ESX the performance boost) and vmfs file system. Having both GSX and ESX in our environment, I can tell you that no one in the IT department wants to use GSX because the ESX servers are much more responsive. Since ESX is much more effecient with the hardware, it allows you to load more VMs on a physical server thus a greater return on that physical server purchase.
Another nice thing is since ESX is the app and the OS, the support contract will cover both. With GSX, you would have to get a support contract for GSX and the host operating system (which would be Windows Server or Linux).
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.
The biggest reason for all the bugs, compatibility issues, and bloat in Microsoft's operating systems is backwards compatibility. And I have to admit that they've done a commendable job, given the tens of thousands of Windows applications out there, each with multiple versions. Not a perfect job, but I have a few ten-year-old applications running, unrecompiled, on my XP box at home.
Microsoft wants Vista to be excellent, and to break new ground, but they are hobbled by binary compatibility issues with versions of Windows dating back to the 80386 -- and the 8086 in some cases. Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility. And with Virtual Server, they can do just that.
Imagine: Your company lives or dies by an application written by a long-gone vendor, that runs great under NT 3.1 but crashes everything written since. No problem! Boot up NT under a virtual server and run it there. Got a proprietary database that only runs on Solaris x86? Same answer. Your kid's favorite game originally written for Windows 95? Hell, a computer built in 2007 won't even notice Win95's footprint.
In fact, it probably makes sense for Microsoft to ship Vista with new versions of XP, NT, 95, Win3.1, DOS 5.0, and whatever else floats their boat, each recompiled with exactly one device driver for video, keyboard, mouse, disk, CD and network.
So everybody's legacy system problems are solved by Virtual Server. Meanwhile, Vista itself provides a fast, stable, flexible platform for new applications to be built on, and Microsoft has a maintainable operating system, completely unencumbered by their past mistakes, that they can improve on for years to come.
This is not my sandwich.
VMware has already been bought. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC.