Slashdot Mirror
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).
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.
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
``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.
Because you can have five servers on three machines and if one physical box goes down, the VMs running on that system can migrate to the other two machines and things can pick up more or less where they left off... if you have a SAN anyway.
It also lets you make upgrades trivially; you can migrate the VM(s) away, upgrade the system, and migrate VM(s) back.
It keeps your system from being tied to any given OS so all you need ever install on a computer is enough OS to run vmware, and vmware itself. If a machine suddenly explodes and you can't get replacement hardware, you're not forced into reinstalling the OS to get Windows booting again.
And finally, there are compelling reasons to run applications on their own system on Linux as well, security not being the least of these issues. It's not just Windows. How's the light down in that basement?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"