Posted on 04/03/2006 8:44:18 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Microsoft will support customers who chose to run Linux with Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2, software for running multiple operating systems on one machine.
In addition, the company on Monday said that it has now made Virtual Server 2005 R2--which the company had charged either $99 for up to four physical processors or $199 for an unlimited number of processors--a free download. The announcements were made in conjunction with the LinuxWorld conference in Boston this week.
Virtualization, an emerging technology which is garnering growing interest from corporate customers, allows a server to run multiple instances of an operating system. This makes it easier for corporations to consolidate many applications on a single hardware server and provides a level of reliabilty.
Microsoft said that it has developed software to simplify the installation of Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell SuSE to run on Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Windows. In addition, Microsoft will provide technical support customers running Windows and Linux side by side.
"We’ve made a long-term commitment to make sure that non-Windows operating systems can be run in a supported manner, both on top of Virtual Server and our future virtualization products," said Zane Adam, director of Windows Server product marketing, in a statement.
Microsoft has said that the server edition of Windows Vista will have virtualization built into it. Specifically, it said it is developing so-called hypervisor software, code-named Viridian, to host multiple operating systems on one machine.
Microsoft faces competition in the market from EMC subsidiary VMware and increasingly the Xen project that's being built into forthcoming versions of Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Well it depends on the comfort zone, for me wasting the memory that a windows graphical shell uses is silly when you can use TWM to connect to a running GSX service on a linux box and consume almost no memory..
VMWare and others share a nic via a virtual interface..
So how is an attack....like a Denial of Service attack handled?
You can reproduced an entire mixed-OS network on one box. A developer using Windows but writing a Linux-hosted application can have Linux right there to test.
One good use of virtualization saves a LOT of money by putting a whole set of servers supporting a function on one box: application server, database server, analysis server, etc. You can then move any of the high-use server images to another box as usage grows beyond that one box's ability to serve the function. Depending on the virtualization technology, you can even move it without a noticeable disruption of service.
The host. All others share. But you can have a computer with, say, three NICs and two virtual machines, and each virtual machine uses one dedicated NIC, one dedicated to the host.
There are a few other ways to set up a network, for example one virtual machine in VirtualPC can use a network adapter and act as a NAT, with all the other VMs in that virtual subnet. Or your VMs can just talk to each other, not even seeing the host. You can also use a loopback adapter to create a more complex network.
Obviously because a lot of people don't like linux, and use their host O/S for more than just virtualiztion. Any more silly questions?
VMware Inc. is opening up its virtual machine disk format specification
Hey there is a situation for everything but if folks want to make use of virtualization and waste memory it fine by me..
Any more silly answers?
I saw that, though the way I had read it (okay the way I skimmed it) was that its not so much opensourcing anything its just opening up the standards for the vmdk files..
Really nice move by VMWare and I hope it pays off..
Isn't that what MS did to Netscape effectively killing it...
Now,.....they wouldn't try that again would they?...../s
Virtualization is already going the way of the browser and the media player, as being something that will be expected within a shipping OS. It's planned for Vista, already capable of being part of a Linux distro, and rumor has it the next OS X will have some kind of seamless virtualization built in.
VMWare uses a concept called "teaming", where you can actually link several virtual servers to launch together as a unit. This can be extremely useful when you are testing out application designs where, say, a webserver has to talk to an app server, which talks to a database. With virtualization you can create the whole shebang (if ya's gots da ram!) on one box and see how they all interoperate.
Virtualization is a major buzzword these days, but unlike many that have come and gone, I really think this is going to be a useful tool for many different purposes. Like everything else that gets overhyped, I'm sure folks will try to shoehorn things into it that don't ultimately make sense, but the company I work for is already seeing reduced support costs with it.
From the article:
This is not an open sourcing of the VMware virtual machine disk format specification. What is VMware doing in the open source area?
Chu: We are opening up the format specification of the virtual machines, but not open sourcing the code. In other areas, we do share our source code for people to work on and contribute their work back to our base. However, we are not open sourcing the code, but sharing it and providing people the ability to contribute to it. For example, our community participants are taking advantage of this to introduce a whole array of InfiniBand capabilities into VMware.
It's great to see that they feel opening up their APIs and such is important to their business, to facilitate the ecosystem that surrounds them. This is an excellent move on their part that will help both their bottom line, and their customers.
I don't believe I can launch them together at one shot, but I have a box here with VirtualPC (not even the server version) and a whole network worth of images, including domain controller, app and database servers, etc. It's fun.
Looks like a stroke of genius reading this other ariticle - they'll even be offering paid support of linux. Well since that's supposedly the only way to make money on linux, how could you blame them? That's the thing about open source, anyone can use it, whether anyone wants them to or not.
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32654
Here's the other kicker in the above article (if true) - up to 4 virtual servers when you buy one Windows Server R2 license. That's probably the biggest news of all, actually.
You bet! It's an absolute godsend as a training tool. You can copy an image to your local disk, boot up into it and do anything, without worrying about anything you might damage, or the hassle that you might have if you do screw something up. I've actually tested out some doomsday senerios where I kill essential services and corrupt critical files to see if the server fails gracefully or not. Once I conclude the test, I can delete the image, and copy down a pristine version in just a couple of minutes.
Ever wondered how long an 'rm -rf /' will run before it dies?
Although what you say may be true, I have also seen the opposite happen: hardcore *nix users (eg. myself, and many present and past coworkers, friends, etc) more willing to install Windows, and run Linux inside any one of several brands of virtual servers. This is far and away a better setup than dual booting.
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