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."

Comments

Microsoft Works?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want Microsoft Works on you server ARM or no?

Re:Microsoft Works?

[cbhacking]

The only really stupid aspect of the Windows-on-Arm (AKA Windows RT) product line was the intentionally crippling it to only be able to run stuff signed by MS. Take out that restriction, and it's actually pretty decent: full web browser (to which Firefox and Chrome and all could have been ported, although - speaking as somebody who tried porting Chrome - that doesn't mean it would be easy), full file management, built-in "root" (just a standard UAC prompt), multi-user support, scripting capability (all the standard Windows languages), built-in Office and Remote Desktop software, ability to use Windows networking (SMB), updates from MS rather than from some OEM that may or may not bother to push important patches or so on, and a bunch of other nice stuff. Combine that with the inability to join domains (a purely artificial restriction, as they didn't even take out the domain-client code; hack the registry a bit and it will happily join domains) and you had something that nobody really wanted

As soon as it was jailbroken, a bunch of useful stuff - ranging from 7-Zip to DOSBox to Python - was ported over. Additionally, anything that was pure .NET, or .NET with P/Invoke of functions from built-in OS libraries, ran without so much as a recompile. The problem was the need to jailbreak (and then the absurd level of effort that MS went to with 8.1 to break the jailbreak). That meant that commercial developers never ported their stuff to RT (all the community-ported apps are open source), and there was no software ecosystem outside of the joke of the Windows Store. One guy, in his spare time, wrote a surprisingly decent x86 emulation layer that could run a reasonable amount of old Wintel software as-is; pay him to do it as his full-time job and it could have run anything that wasn't simply too performance-intensive for the dynamic recompilation on low-powered CPUs.

So, with that said, an "RT Server" could be pretty useful... if MS didn't go all brain-dead on third party software again. Not a lot of point running a web server that can't run PHP or Java or even ASP.NET to host web applications, these days. File serving is fine as long as you stick to SMB, assuming it can also join a domain and do all the standard Win Server stuff with volume management, I guess.

Link = Download?

[danknight48]

Nice checking on the editing there /.

Re:Link = Download?

[Mr Z]

Remove the / from the end of the link and it works. Annoying.

why u no love me timothy?

[SmartAboutThings]

it seems that moderator timothy likes to modify my submission links all the time. sigh...

Irrelevant

[ArhcAngel]

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.

Re:Irrelevant

[ledow]

The problem would be that the virtualisation of ARM on Intel or vice versa would suffer quite large performance problems. You're basically into emulation, rather than virtualisation.

So even if they could do that, you wouldn't see much point in doing it over just running your Intel stuff on Intel hypervisors and your ARM stuff on ARM hypervisors. What you'd gain would be, well, almost nothing.

At least it's a showing, though, that the Microsoft code is in a big better shape that they can port things across. That is, of course, assuming it ever comes to fruition. Microsoft has had a lot of non-Intel architectures over the years and they've always played second-fiddle and then been obsoleted.

Quite what they expect to get from aiming at ARM, I can't see. You won't get Intel compatibility, so you're effectively running another OS that - actually - only specialist places that are running huge compute farms etc. are using, or smaller gadgets where you'll struggle to sell a non-compatible Windows (like Windows CE was).

diversity isnt the problem

[nimbius]

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 luck with that

[pak9rabid]

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?

Those who don't know history...

[bobbied]

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.

Re:Those who don't know history...

[Bugler412]

The only reason NT on Alpha failed was market share driven by DEC's hardware prices (the only source of Alpha based servers at the time) was about three times the equivalent i386 server from Dell or Compaq. I ran a shop fully populated with Alpha's running NT 3.1, 3.51 and NT4 at first, we switched to Dell i386 servers because of this. The DEC Alpha's did have very good availability and uptime, but for three times the cost, and very limited to non-existent third party software (backup software, security software, etc.). It was very hard to justify the expense. Not to mention being locked in to DEC for auxiliary hardware like NICs and RAID controllers which limited the selection severely, and again at triple the cost per unit. DEC Alpha's running NT were great runners, but their hardware pricing, selection and availability is what did it in, not weakness of the OS on that platform. Methinks you should get your facts and root causes for the failures in the market of the Alpha/NT product straight before you spout off.

There may be no efficiency gains

[Junta]

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.