Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Works On Windows For ARM-Based Servers
SmartAboutThings writes According to some reports from the industry, Microsoft is working on a version of its software for servers that run on chips based on ARM Holdings's technology. Windows Server now runs on Intel hardware, but it seems that Redmond wants to diversify its strategy. An ARM-based version of Windows Server could help challenge Intel's dominance and make a place for ARM in the server market, not only in mobile chips. According to the article, though, Microsoft "hasn’t yet decided whether to make the software commercially available."
Why would you want Microsoft Works on you server ARM or no?
Nice checking on the editing there /.
this is because Windows RT did so well! Hey, mr CEO, you clearly need to lay off more people.
it seems that moderator timothy likes to modify my submission links all the time. sigh...
That will not fly.
The majority of shops these days run a hypervisor on the bare metal and load Windows as a virtual machine. Now if Microsoft is working on an ARM version of Hyper-V that's a different story. But even the hard core Microsoft shops I work with use VMWare as their hypervisor of choice.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Is the ARM version of Windows Server going to be arbitrarily limited to Microsoft Store apps with the exception of a handful of Microsoft applications and services, too?
Redmond wants to diversify its strategy.
Microsoft makes video games, consoles, operating systems, telephones, cloud services, office applications, car stereos, tablets, mice, keyboards, voip calling, a search engine, an internet browser, almost a dozen proprietary coding languages, educational books, a GPS map website, portable music players, internet chat, wireless display adapters, internet email and storage, a SQL server, and a gob of money on its training and certification services. The problem is mircosoft is creating products people do not need.
each of the aforementioned offerings has had an industry or at least socially accepted standard in place for more than 2 years, and in some cases more than a decade. Microsofts problem is that they cant come up with new ideas and fail to see the logic behind existing ideas. Arm started out as a Unix platform, and has been extensively developed as a Linux platform. the Linux kernels ARM support has existed for 4 years, which seems to be the average amount of time it takes redmond to realize something new has happened. Even if Redmond offered an arm-server version of windows, it would have to compete with well documented, functional, and most importantly free versions of Linux that likely exist on ARM because they were proven assets in X86 for their particular task, not because Windows didnt exist at the time. the standard track-run of a microsoft offering will likely be provided with their ARM offering:
1. Arm is offered, priced to buy, and servers preloaded with the microsoft tax
2. Arm is subsidized in standard licensing contracts to major businesses beholden to redmond in their desktop environment. rejecting the subsidies will cause a loss of already existing discounts, just like Azure.
3. this dole will be touted as market acceptance of Windows for ARM. metrics will be conveyed in trade journals and PHB will respond with demo units for the tech teams.
4. Tech teams will ignore the device as its not needed and performance is significantly worse than the existing *nix, not to mention exising code ported from x86 unix/linux systems wont run on it.
5. Microsoft will bail cash from XBox revenue into their ARM venture for 5-8 years, or roughly 1 zune.
6. Microsoft will quietly EOL the product and never speak of it again.
7. Microsoft will spin the wayback machine 4 years into the past and try their hand at Microsoft twitter or some equally doomed project.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Here.
Well, at least a non-malformed link.
Best Slashdot Co
Haha! Desperate times call for desperation.
Bwana Ebola
Might as well bring out Windows Server for the DEC Alpha.
Microsoft "hasn't yet decided whether to make the software commercially available."
Microsoft, get back to me when you decide to make it commercially available and I'll decide whether I want it.
Chances are I won't.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
...except that hardly anyone uses Windows on servers and few people use ARM-based servers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-27/microsoft-said-to-work-on-software-for-arm-based-servers.html
-Dave
MS couldn't produce a mobile device that anybody wanted (where ARM makes much more sense). What makes them think they're going to have any success on the server front?
Are bound to repeat it. (And those who do know history are doomed to watch helplessly while others repeat it).
Didn't Microsoft try this with NT? I recall that it had a DEC workstation Variant (Not that it worked all that well.)
My guess is that all the people who understood why this effort failed so completely are now gone and few are left who remember the lesson learned for Microsoft in that boondoggle. So the young bucks are now in the process of repeating the history they don't know. They will get *some* market share, but for the price sensitive user, Linux will be a better option for ARM because going to ARM only makes sense for large sized installs. Large installs have huge license costs and start to look cheaper on Linux, even with the management costs being more.
My guess is that this won't go well for Microsoft, but if they want to shoot themselves in the foot again, so be it. Personally, I'd not want to poke the Intel bear too much if I was Microsoft.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
...except that hardly anyone uses Linux on desktops and fewer people use ARM-based desktops. Combined desktop and server counts are in favor of Windows use, by far.
Odd then then MS has the world of desktops + servers combined by a huge longshot vs. any other competing operating system solution. For a company that shot itself in the foot (according to a nobody like you complete with your delusions) they're doing far better than anyone else on pc desktops + servers combined worldwide.
ARM won over in the mobile device space because of solid engineering around a low power envelope, without trying to compete with x86 performance in any way. Basically Intel made a mistake by not having *any* appropriate chips for that space at all. Performance per watt was never demonstrated to be better if you followed the curve up to desktop/server class energy consumption. Intel has actually competently answered in their Atom space, and has secured some mindshare among Android vendors (which I never would have guessed could be possible). Intel is second comer to the party and thus the ecosystem is clearly stacked against them, but they still managed to get their components in the market.
Some vendors are starting to tout ARM based competitors to Xeon. The problem being their energy consumption numbers at this point are actually higher and achieve lower performance numbers in compute and have worse I/O capability.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is this really surprising? The NT code base used to run on more than "Wintel" commodity hardware. The old NT was running on all sorts of things like DEC workstations. So it's portable, or should be if "Wintel" dependencies haven't crept in over the years. They could port the code to any architecture, and probably want to to make sure that it's still portable. Whether this is a viable product or not is a whole other matter, but MS probably doesn't care. If server ARM takes off, they're ready, if it doesn't they don't care.
wasn't NT 3.5 available for ARM, DEC Alpha, Power PC *and* x86? wasn t the core of the NT kernel based on the Mach kernel, and written almost exclusively in c? so what the hell went wrong??
Why on earf would someone need to run Windows server on a home wireless router or a single purpose home-theater ultra compact PC?
Thought there was a story not so long ago about Intel producing ARM based chips (albeit for 3rd parties)
A Windows server is likely to run the services that come with the OS. It's not so much like desktop-style use, where people want to run a game from 2008, genealogy software from 1997, and the software that came with the printer and camera on disc. Windows on ARM was toast for that market as well as failing to replicate the tablet/phone crap market of iOS and Android, which were available years earlier.
On the other hand small LAN infrastructure servers are useful. Now imagine some Mac Mini sized shit running that, next to the company's router and NAS. Yes it should all be linux, ldap, pam or kerberos, nfs, samba, bind etc. but for some reason a Windows server is prefered to a *nix guru, perhaps it's more easy to get one.
And then a ton of server stuff doesn't care about the CPU : .NET, java, PHP and the others.
Short answer : it doesn't matter much and they already own a huge share of the server market.
More like cannot get it to be worth the effort.
W* has many internal functions that are tied to modern processors. While ARM is interesting and very interesting in the embedded market it lacks full server functionality. W* doesn't allow the administrator to fine tune the OS to fit the exact environment required. W* is what you get whether you want it or not.
Add in the traditional MSFT inefficient code base and the problems escalate. Or should I say they slow down.
Intel is second comer to the party and thus the ecosystem is clearly stacked against them, but they still managed to get their components in the market.
It is amazing what you can acheive if you are prepared to lose (sorry, I mean "Contra Revenue") $1B/quarter by massively subsidsing development and silicon costs.
The history NT is really a fear of what happened to the crappy DOS based operating systems such as Windows.
NT from day 1 was purposedly not made x86 as the main cpu as people used assembler more in those days and MS management knew it would loose its portability and later security by having x86 hacks and direct memory calls in the kernel etc.
So NT 3.1 was made for the MIPS first on SGI then backported to x86. This continued to PowerPC in 1990s with NT 3.51 and NT 4 and later Alpha with Windows 2000. Itanium was made target which is why Balmer demoed Server 2003 on it first as x86 was not ready.
Today it is ARM. Actually it is very smart engineering wise to do this.
We all hate MS on Slashdot as it is the pro Unix anti MS site since the 1990s so it is a given here. But really portability was never a problem and it iw as not a dumb move.
In the long term ARM and low power cpus make sense for things like Database where I/O and not cpu is the bottleneck. Even in Java servelts and .NET app servers it is waiting for data() from the spinning piles or rust to fill a query more than the CPU.
The only thing is ARM loses its lower power qualities as soon as it does more and you add more things to it like virtualization, FPUS, etc.
http://saveie6.com/
Actually, NT 3.1 was developed on MIPS based DECstations 3000, and on i860s. After the x86, it was ported to the Alpha. PowerPC came much later. In terms of dropping support, MIPS died first, then PPC and then Alpha.
Given that failure, MS should avoid doing it for ARM. If they need a non-Intel CPU, they should port RT to the MIPS CPU, since that's still an active CPU, even if SGI is dead as far as RISC boxes go.
...but I mentioned it for the past two years: Microsoft biggest problem is that their foray into the ARM world with RT did not come with a server version. Yes, I know that RT was designed to be craptastic. Absolutely needlessly given that a much lower powered Pi can do more. ARM servers and their low power consumption allow for having many of them tightly packed into rack space and get turned on and used only when needed. Many enterprises have cyclical demands for processing power, especially for financials. One option would be using cloud resources on demand, but enterprise financials and cloud are a mix that causes a tummy ache for many. Anyhow, Windows Server for ARM is a necessity to have for Microsoft and as usual they will be years too late to market with this. And maybe, just maybe it will not suck and comes without Metro garbage, ribbon crap, and eye candy that has no business on a server OS.