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Longhorn Server Will Stress Virtualization
Rob writes in with an article from CBROnline based on an interview with Microsoft's UK server director. He says the timing of the release of the next version of Microsoft's server OS, dubbed Longhorn, depends on the company getting virtualization ready to go. Microsoft has apparently decided to embed its hypervisor technology into Windows, an OS-centric approach to virtualization shared by XenSource Inc., its open-source rival and partner. This contrasts with the model of virtualizing the hardware layer being pursued by VMWare. The Microsoft spokesman is coy about a release date for Longhorn, saying it could be earlier or it could be later (but it should be in 2007).
Is the virtualization gonna be recursive?
If so, how will they handle licenses of licenses of licenses of...?
And will Active Directory be able to handle trees of trees of trees of... license keys?
Yawn...if Microsoft could write an OS that had decent multi tasking, a responsive scheduler, and adequate memory allocation and protection, the appeal of running a bunch of virtual machines just to run a bunch of different jobs and keep them from interfering with each other would be much less. This has been done before, most notably by VMS..I used to manage a cluster of large VMS systems, each of which had dozens of Oracle databasea on them, supported interactive editing of documents for hundreds of people, and ran a mixed bag of financial, accounting, engineering and program development applications...all on the same machines....looks like Microsoft and Cutlerdidn't incorporate enough of it in Windows...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
They basically gave up pretending Windows is a multitasking multiuser platform and now start recommending one Windows per one service. This is of course what everyone has been doing since Windows servers started getting deployed. It's HELL to keep windows with one service running operational, because the system is a black box of maggots. This used to sell lots of server hardware.
Longhorn on the bottom virtualization enabled, n longhorns on top in sandboxes, guess whether the suc^h^h^hclients have to buy one or one+n licenses?
Each one of those sublicenses being licensed server 2003-style? Pay more for each connection?
One server dedicated for Virtualization Interoperability Manager 2007 Pro Signature Version? (a la TS client service?)
They lost, they know they lost, now the only way to keep their marketshare is legislation and DRM to keep the format lock-ins and infrastructure lock-ins in place.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
ESX 3.x management client requires a .NET platform running on windows. No mono, no wine. Yes, it's snappier than the web interface, but jesus - they should bundle as many free windows licenses as the client requires with every ESX3 sold. It's BS I have to run VMware 3 Infrastructure Console in XP in VMware Workstation on Linux. That's one winblows license for no extra functionality and tons of RAM and resources wasted for this ludicrous tie-in.
To rephrase: they sell a lean and mean proprietary VM hypervisor kernel that uses linux for management and stuff. It can run on any OS. And you're required to run a closed proprietary OS to manage it.
This is not only insane it's DANGEROUS. What if M$ broke .NET in the next hotfix so that VMware ESX 3 management software broke?
There have been demands for a mono or unix or linux native client to manage ESX3 for at least 18 months and STILL no official word from VMware. I wonder how much money M$ paid VMware to get one of their worst competitors to bend over.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Right, but you have to have a full Windows Server 2003 loaded with IIS (if I'm not mistaken) to run VS 2005.
VMWare runs a very light weight linux OS, with a few specialized tools, freeing up as much CPU, RAM, and storage as possible to the VM's.
Now, if I was at Microsoft, designing their new virtualization app, I'd build the next Virtual Server AS the OS. And follow through with letting it run any OS in the virtualized environment. Hell, given the right CPU, let it emulate any CPU, free the OS from the hardware.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
``And, I believe that Linux is the "better" OS in that the kernel has gone through a more stringent review process.''
Moreover, you can easily strip Linux down to just the bare minimum needed to run the hypervisor. No need to waste several hundred megabytes of RAM on features you won't be using.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
definitely, but vmware should be seeking to introduce virtualization to other markets. They are already making inroads to business desktops with ACE, but there are many more markets to bring virtualization to. Home computing comes to mind (a virtual PC for each member of the family running on a single physical machine), and i am sure many others.
moi
Why is there all this interest in virtualization?
Is it because it isolates the services from each other, because people can't write services that don't trash their environment and thereby corrupt other services and/or the OS? If so, that seems to be both the service's fault for being so badly written, and the OS's fault for doing such a poor job of protecting services from each other.
Is it because Windows can't multitask well and/or doesn't protect processes from each other well? If so, why does anyone think that another layer of Windows is the answer? If Windows can't protect processes from each other, why does anyone think it can protect VMs from each other? If it can't multitask well among processes, why does anyone think it can multitask well among VMs?
In short, why does anyone think this is the answer? Isn't the answer to get a real OS, one that actually works?
If you're running your Win32/DX games on OSX, then it's an OSX machine that happens to be running Windows as a task or translation layer. The computer is not a Windows box.
MS is all about market share. Without that, they're nothing. That's why they perform stranglehold tactics on PC manufacturers, like this. If people can run to the store and buy a piece of software and run it anywhere, then what's the point of Windows?
Most of us already own an XP disc. With no reason to buy another one, the whole Windows revenue stream dries up.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.