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Microsoft Unveils Virtualization Strategy
billstewart writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will be announcing a virtualization strategy on Tuesday. Of course there's plenty of focus on the competition with VMware, including the obligatory reference to Microsoft's entry into the browser wars prior to cutting off Netscape's air supply. The pieces of the picture will include: an alliance with Citrix Systems, owners of XenSource; acquisition of privately held Calista Technologies of San Jose, which has software that speeds up the performance of applications running in a virtualized environment; and lower price for Windows Vista used on virtualized computers. Microsoft also reversed its earlier position and will now allow the Home Basic and Home Premium versions of Vista to run under virtualization. The company confirmed its plans to deliver its Hyper-V hypervisor within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008 (betas available now), which is expected this quarter."
Well, I think there's something to worry about here. Bearing in mind Virtualization is the Next Big Thing ® right now, and businesses being quick on the up-take (I know my employer is a big fan, and we have ~5k employees and several large in-house development departments), I think it's going to be a bonus for a company to take a Virtualization offering from their primary OS supplier. Especially when you've got it in live deployments.
Is there room in the market for MS? Or will they squeeze VMWare out? We'll soon find out...
ilovegeorgebush
If I were a prospective client, I would think about the effective way IE killed the then king netscape, sure.
I would also think about the way IE turned into an awfully modularized insecure POS after winning.
Let's just hope Xen makers don't play the part of NCSA Mosaic.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Xen won't squeeze VMWare out until they get themselves a freakin' UI that is usable.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... the solution to Vista is to use it to run Ubuntu inside VMWare...?
I hope that even with the Hyper-V stuff that is based in Windows Server 2008, that MS keeps VirtualPC updated. For what it does, its excellent as a quick and dirty hypervisor, especially for stuff like Thinstall where you just need to open a VM briefly to do a check before installing, install a program, run the afterwards delta, then build the Thinstalled output. No special client or Web server needed (as opposed to the latest VMWare 2.0 beta which seemed to require a full Java, Apache and Tomcat install and available to the world to even turn on.)
The Hyper-V implementation in the RC1 build of Windows Server 2008 requires your CPU have specific hardware virtualization built in, so you can't really use it on anything less than midrange+ hardware. Maybe its a good thing, as MS is likely intending this for machines designed for being VM servers from the ground up.
Microsoft will do what they always do, bring out something that is good enough for 95% of people, 95% of the time. They'll leave the finer points to third parties. It'll be good enough for most places running Windows only networks.
There appear to be several virtualisation platforms appearing on the Linux side. I haven't used Xen myself, as when we were moving to virtualisation it didn't have the capabilities or support that VMWare did.
Unless VMware gets its act together it's going to lose market share pretty quickly. The documentation is awful. Just. Fucking. Awful. There's tons of it to be sure, but it's contradictory, badly written, confusing and downright wrong in places.
Ultimately I think Microsoft's hypervisor will become the default for Windows, and one of the others for Linux. VMware will become a niche product.
Whether you go for their whole strategy or not, a good thing to come out of their announcement is them allowing non-Ultimate Vista to be virtualisable (or non-Business, or whichever of the twenty levels they arbitrarily set it at the last time).
I'm on OS X and run a VMware image of XP for a couple of apps. I have no need for Vista, but should a need arise I can now upgrade to the lower versions and carry on running. MS gets some money from me it previously wouldn't have had and I can still use my platform of choice.
That's good news for people.
Cheers,
Ian
I know that slashdot eds are supposed to be the some of the worst ever, but MS is in the running... One of the suppported OS's for the Hyper v is.... Microsoft Office 97 or later version
The below is taken from the MS website.
"System Requirements
* Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista; Windows XP
Microsoft Office 97 or later version"
should be to run a virtualized Ballmer so that they can shut him down whenever he puts both of his dancing shoes in his mouth during interviews.
Interviewer: "Mr Ballmer, how cool is the Brown Zune?"
Ballmer: "It's an iPod killer. I squirt to you, you squirt to me and then..."
[Ballmer disappears suddenly]
Interviewer: "Wha... What happened?"
Voice From Above: "Do Not Worry. The Virtual Ballmer Has Been Shut Down. Your Interview Has Not Been Affected."
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
VMWare will automatically move virtual servers off of failing hardware; you need your servers to be clustered to get similar functionality from Microsoft.
Until Microsoft's virtualization offering has the hardware independence that VMWare has, many businesses will (correctly) consider it a weak product.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.
In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.
I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.
On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.
Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.
Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.
Windows virtualization strategy is to embrace Linux in the server rooms by virtualizing it. This will degrade Linux from an operating system to an application stack. You will buy the OS from Microsoft, and the Linux application stack from Novell.
Thus, Microsoft will extend Linux by providing better drivers to proprietary HW, nice managing consoles, etc.
When this is sufficiently entrenched, the extinguish phase can begin when somehow Microsofts virtualized software stacks run better than the virtualized Linux stack.
)9TSS