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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...
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
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.
Might as well bring out Windows Server for the DEC Alpha.
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
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.
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.
Not based on Mach, so far as I know. The head guy on the NT kernel team, Dave Cutler, came to Microsoft from DEC, where he'd been working on VMS. With that said, NT wasn't really based on anything else (although some of the TCP/IP stack in pre-6.0 versions apparently came from BSD). It was supposed to be a microkernel, but round about the 4.0 timeframe a bunch of stuff got shoved back into the kernel for performance reasons, because switching ring levels was expensive enough to matter back then.
It is, however, written almost entirely in portable C code. In fact, when being originally developed, they explicitly did not target x86 so as to avoid letting any x86-isms slip into the code base; you could say x86 was the first architecture it was ported *to*.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...