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How Virtualization Led Microsoft to Support Linux
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Why did Microsoft make the surprise announcement that it would support business customers who also use Linux? Because of the increasing importance of virtualization, Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'Once businesses start using virtualization to cut back on the number of machines they need to buy, "a light bulb goes on over their head," says Tony Iams, who follows the field for Ideas International, an analyst group,' Gomes writes. 'Other uses become apparent, such as backing up data or easily adding processor power to a particular application as the need arises.' VMware pioneered the market, but now Microsoft is 'expected to offer sophisticated virtualization products in the next year or two,' Gomes writes. 'The company currently has a fairly rudimentary product, which was involved in its big Linux announcement earlier this month.'"
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
If you support virtualization and not allow Linux in the picture, then somone else will make a system that virtualizes Linux and Windows. Simple as that.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Microsoft is 'expected to offer sophisticated virtualization products in the next year or two,' Does Microsoft's definition of "sophisticated" include inducing random data corruption in any non-Microsoft OS? I think I'd be more a lot more comfortable getting my virtualization products from somebody that lets me look at the source code.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The simple fact is that M$ wants to keep its name in the big buisnesses because 10,000 licenses a year is a big deal, plus those big boys of buisness also influence their workers to be familiar with windows, which leads their families to purchase windows, and so on and so on.
What about IBM? Seems VMWare is about 40 years late.
Didn't VMWare have its start as the IBM product VM/386? It was released in the early 90's, but at the time IBM really didn't know what to do with it - they had their hands full with trying to quit alienating OS/2 developers...
Didn't VM/360 come about in the early 70's? Is it really over 40 years old?
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
We swear! It has nothing to do with Boot Camp or VMWare!
Before everyone gets all smiley and happy about this, what depth of support are they offering?
Are we talking OS configuration and administration support, or merely: "Is your Linux VM booting?" level of support?
I've heard conflicting reports about this. Can anyone set the record straight? I'm asking you, MS Virtual Server team...
And wake me up when MS also natively supports Ext3, ReiserFS, etcetera on their own OSes too (do they?). Microsoft not interoperating with others, while everybody else tries to play nice with each other, could eventually lead to it's downturn as it is painting itself into a corner. Especially since they aren't the only game in town (practically) in a lot of areas like they used to be in the late 80's, and most of the 90's.
Wake me when they support NTFS on Linux.
If by "they" you mean the open-source crowd, then check out here.
If by "they" you mean Microsoft, then check the status here.
Seems Microsoft's just getting to step 5.
It's all vaporware. Vaporware until it actually ships -- if ever.
And in Microsoft's case, it's vaporware until version 3.0 at least.
Or until they buy a company that already knows how to do it properly.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If it doesn't, the support is only half (assed).
...) will not be possible).
(if windows vista x64 will only support signed drivers, that might be the case, which means that interoperability of 64 bit windows with linux (ext2/3 fs,
And wake me up when MS also natively supports Ext3, ReiserFS, etcetera on their own OSes too
Why? With virtualization, the host OS has no need to understand the guest OS's filesystem any more than it needs to know the guest's binary format. You just point it at a partition or an FS image file, and let it do its thing.
Some of us actually consider that one of the most useful features of running a virtual machine - Absolutely perfect 100% backups involve nothing more complicated than shutting down the guest OS and copying its image file. You can even perfectly backup a running OS that way, you just need to pause it and do a state dump; Then when you restart it, you resume right where you left off.
"The fact that Microsoft is now supporting, if only grudgingly, that sort of mix shows how much things can change even while staying the same."
It's called, Tao. Don't just know it or acknowledge it. Understand it and Let it flow.
Linux way is the Tao way.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Microsoft wants to remain relevant with the OEMs. The way to keep that secure is to make sure that OEM will still offer Windows with their servers. Virtualization's emergence may redefine the importance of the operating system. It is spreading from high end server right down to the desktop. Microsoft will be keen to support competitors operating systems including Linux because Linux certianly will support Windows via VMWare/Xen. Otherwise, OEMs will begin bundling Linux over Windows with the knowlegde that it can always be install after market as a virtual OS. When that happens Microsoft loses clout with the OEMs which may trickle down to destops. Also, the other reason is to compete to be the host OS and not the virtual one because the customer may rely more on that OS than the virtual one and is more likely to invest more in it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Here is a link to a video from MS virtualization developers:
Channel 9: Virtualization
You will be able to tell they're ready to make serious money on this when they offer a cut rate discounted license for "Windows 2003 server, virtual machine edition" On top of "Windows Virtual Server"
This way, you get a VMware ESX style OS to handle virtual servers on the box which would presumably come with some set number of windows server licenses, and a per virtual server licensing option for windows running on virtualization options other than MS's own.
Sell in option would be to do server consolidation for companies. The pitch? "Let us consolidate these 10 servers onto one box for you, you save the yearly maintenance costs on 9 servers, and we credit your account part of what those 2003 server licenses are costing on all of them to help subsidize the virtualization software with double that number of virtual windows servers licensed on it."
The potential is here for it to be truly insidious.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
"Wake me when they support NTFS on Linux."
Wake me up when NTFS is an open standard that can be supported by third parties without selling your fist born to pay for it.
virtualization is great (in theory), but will MS be offering write support for it's archaic and flawed NTFS without sacrificing transfer speed? What about ReiserFS and ext3FS support? Instead of converting completely to Linux, companies will pay for the Windows license, use whatever they want inside the shell, and the information therein is (presumably) accessible to Windows users. I'm going to venture a guess and say that MS is performing triage, advertising software (which VMware already sells) that will help your company have a smooth transition into Linux. In the past, VMware had trouble with kernel upgrades, which will likely be the case with MS as well. In the end, why switch to an OS where you don't have to worry about adware/spyware utilities that suck up system resources, an idle process that steals resources, or patches that leave you with your pants down? You can run it from inside the OS that gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling and has that familiar loading chime.
"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's a heuristic /. post generator! Nearly fooled me, too. It could pass the Turing Test for unprecedented realism in slashdotter emulation.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Becuase that's all ESX Server does. It's a host OS who's sole purpose is to manage the virtual machines running on it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Why did Microsoft make the surprise announcement that it would support business customers who also use Linux
A surprise? Ok, if I knew they were going to do this over two years ago, how did Virtual Server's support of Linux become a surprise?
The *nix subsystem is a BSD variant in Windows as well now, and if Linux gains more popularity, look for a Linux subsystem running on the NT core.
However with Virtual Server support, it is simple economics... Support Linux Images running in Windows 2003, so people that are relunctant to move to Windows, can move to Windows 2003 Server, and slowly migrate or not migrate the Linux applications that are running in Virtual Server.
Microsoft has a win win situation... The strange part is I find people in the Linux world think this is a 'good' thing for Linux. It is how Microsoft will ensure even heavy Linux Server companies can always choose Microsoft...
Gotta love the clueless mainstream press. If Dell didn't use virtual servers, they would have had to move to new offices. This special technology squeezes ten boxes into one. Yeah, that's the ticket. But that one box doesn't do the work of ten. Nope. It still does the work of one. I guess no one wants to tell the guy at Dell that he didn't need 100 servers after all. 10 would have done the work. Not that the author would or could explain that bad news to the potential victims of the hype fest. The real problem is that no one can build a secure OS that really isolates the various programs. And since it's too hard for people to install and configure a server to share nicely, it's just easier to build "virtual servers'. But knowing computers the way I do, I wonder whether anyone can ever stop one virtual machine from bringing down the others. Maybe the hardware level protections are great enough, but I wonder...
I realize I could just ask Google, but why not ask humans at Slashdot? How much does the virtualization cost us. It's clear that 10 boxes can't do the work of 100. They can only do the work of 10. But how much does the virtualization absorb? Is it 10% so the 10 boxes really do the work of 9? Or is it worse?
And what's a bit troubling to me is that this is the second layer of bureaucracy in the machines. The OS already has semi-virtualization turned on to keep the different processes from running into each other. What does the second layer cost in performance?
but now Microsoft is 'expected to offer sophisticated virtualization products in the next year or two.
So, what's new. We've seen it before.
1. Say that you are going to release a "new", "feature rich", "superior", etc. product after an year.
2. Businesses stop buy competing products, thus killing the competitors.
3. Release a crappy product, stolen (or bought) from someone, and cripple it more.
4. ?????? (Balmer jumps, etc.)
5. Profit
I had a bet with a guy I knew that this would not happen before Microsoft started becoming less popular and was bought out by some other company.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Pardon my ignorance, but the only reason I run Windows at home is for games, like Call of Duty.
Does this virtualization stuff mean I can now switch to Linux and run a virtualized Windows session on it to play my Windows-based games?
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Then WinFS was stripped out of Windows Vista because the performance was so horrible. WinFS will supposedly ship around the same time as Windows Vista now, as an add-on. Or maybe it will be later than that. Maybe it will never ship. Who the heck knows? Who cares anymore?
it's funny because it's true
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
I remember downloading the Microsoft Virtual PC product from the company MSDN subscription a few months back to try it out and the performance really tanked on my dev workstation. It was just not fast enough to do any serious development tasks inside the virtual instance. Perhaps if the software were installed on a more powerful machine and then configured to accept terminal server connections, but I never bothered to go that far. I already have three decent older servers retired from production for my testing purposes, none of which are substantially more powerful than my current workstation, and the chances of purchasing allocating funds for a shiny new Virtual PC test server are slim right now so I will just make do with my machines and switcher box for the time being. Has anyone else had a similar experience with virtualization or am I missing something?
I understand why someone would want NTFS read support under Linux. I use it. But write support? It seems like a logical nightmare: how do you write to NTFS and keep consistent ownership/permissions? You'd have to map all the users under Linux into the NT user database, and that goes beyond filesystem support. And matching between the two security models would be even more of a problem.
Microsoft doesn't natively support it, but it gave Windows the extensibility to access other filesystems.
See http://www.fs-driver.org/
/. is irrelevant.
The true question that should be asked around this VT hype is when (oh when??) will Intel start shipping the hardware that would support their VT technology. I've been going all over the net trying to find a clue for a stated roadmap of Intel to provide the peripherals (BIOS, chipset) for a true VT @ XEN "desktop server" ;)
Some insights? Intel?
"Keep reading, Keep reading. Nothing to see here"
I hope that the kqemu modules (that gives qemu true virtualization throug a kernel module) will get some founds and get opensource soon :), so that at least there will be some competition.
I find strange that people talk a lot about Xen and friends while kqemu is not being considered at all.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
I was thinking about this exact thing the other day because of a post I read on comp.theory. It's a complicated issue and I can't pretend to have a solution. Essentially it boils down to the fact that computers can contain time-sensitive state information.
I think the two biggest issues for stopping/restarting a server are: persistent connections (think TCP/IP) and timed events. If the remote server decided it lost your connection and hung up on you in the interim, you're not going to get your SSH client back to the exact same state it was in.
Also, there's a big difference in saying:
vs
Suppose I hibernate the system or pause the VM at 1 microsecond before the expected callback and restart it one microsecond after. When the system resumes, will it ever execute the scheduled event? What if I leave the system off for a week?
Clearly you probably don't want to run every nightly cron job you missed if you kept a server in hibernation for a week, but you might be pissed if it failed to run a job that typically only happens on the 2nd blue moon after the vernal equinox in the year of the pigeon. What if the server has a program whose internal state relies on its ability to receive callbacks?
Again, I don't have an answer but since I've been thinking about this lately I wanted to get it off my chest.
This is not necessarily the case. If i were to remove my hard drive formatted in NTFS and move it to a foreign windows domain, Microsoft chooses to leave the unresolved user accounts as is. In fact, the only accounts common to both systems would be the default administrator/administrators group, and the guest account.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I don't see any showstopper problem there. Some cron tasks will need to be run, some frequent tasks need only be run once, etc. Only the creator of the task can tell which is which, and they need to configure cron appropriately. This would require a new crontab flag. Alternatively, the task itself could notice if it's being run twice at the same date (after a long hibernation).
However, looking at the cron manual page on a reasonably current linux system, it will simply skip all tasks if the time jumps more than three hours at once. Probably it's not a big problem in practice.
Rapidly becoming the over-hyped buzzword of 2006 :D
The advantage MS has is that they are the only people that can make changes to the NT kernel. Their virtualization products are written by people in the same division as the NT kernel team, so they can work very closely to ensure that Windows runs optimally atop Virtual Server. No other virtualization product will be able to run Windows better than Virtual Server, and Virtual Server only runs on Windows. If MS then publishes documentation on the interfaces between the guest kernel and the virtualization software it won't be long before Linux can run nicely on Virtual Server too. Consequently Virtual Server will be the only product that can run both Windows and Linux optimally, and Virtual Server only runs on Windows. Once veryone has their virtual machines in Virtual Server it will be difficult to migrate them to other products, so Microsoft is securing Windows server licences for some time to come.
What Microsoft's products are missing is support for the latest-and-greatest hardware-supported virtualization systems. Both Intel and AMD have (incompatible, competing) technologies in their latest CPUs which allow a lot of the grunt work for virtualization to be done in hardware rather than by emulating devices. The open source virtualization product Xen can make use of this through its hypervisor.
Microsoft is currently working on its own hypervisor-based product, but I seem to remember that they are tying it to Longhorn since the hypervisor is being co-developed with the Windows kernel team; I think they're planning to also use it as part of the DRM subsystem or something. Vista keeps getting pushed back, so the virtualization product does too.