Microsoft competes with VMware in virtualization
After a major delay in the early spring which threw off the development cycle of Windows Server 2008, a public beta is being released by Microsoft this morning. The Viridian team said it would have to cut key features from the product in order for it to make its dates. The first public beta of Viridian, we learned, would be made available in the second half of 2007, but no more than 180 days prior to the RTM date. With the big rollout party now scheduled for February 27, at an event tentatively titled “Heroes Happen Here,” and with the second half of this year drawing to a quick — and, for many, icy — close, Microsoft is now making the first beta of what it now calls Hyper-V available for public download, as it says, “earlier than expected.”
This morning at about a quarter to noon Eastern time, the download link for Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate 1 Enterprise with Hyper-V Beta officially went live. BetaNews FileForum has posted a shortcut to this download. The RC1 edition of the operating system had already been released, but now Microsoft is providing an alternate edition of WS2K8 RC1 that includes the Hyper-V beta built-in — Microsoft is not releasing the Hyper-V beta separately. The RC will automatically time out on June 30. Hyper-V retains support for a single virtual OS running on up to 16 physical processor cores simultaneously (the original goal was for 256), with support for 64 GB of addressable memory per virtual machine. The beta will provide guest operating support for both 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2003 and WS2K8 for now, though guest support for other brands is said to be forthcoming. Is this a major competition for VMware? I think we will have to wait few more months or years to be able to say this…
Source: Betanews
Comments(15)
Interesting…
I wonder how longer it will takes to hack this server
2003 has been hacked in 15mins
this won’t work msft blows…..vmware is gonna stay on top for sure
…Legacy support only activated when needed through virtualization? Cause that would own.
Virtualbox FTW! http://www.virtualbox.org/
next thing we’ll know is…
“VMware sues Micro$oft”.
Yet another M$ product with cut features.. making a habit of this aren’t they?
This could actually be the first meaningful step forward after Win2k.. Let’s face it, WinXP is only marginally better than 2k, and based on the same tech…
Vista is ME repeated, IMHO. And before you fanboiz start giving me sheite, I tried both 32- and 64-bit ultimate on a C2D 4400 with 2×2 GB of RAM and a GF8800 GTS 320, so I’m not complaining about speed… It really is pure crap trough and trough.
I really do hope Micro$uck doesn’t find a way to fäg this up.
Virtualization is: The Virtual Machine tell us we own a Quad Core CPU with 4 GB RAM and a GForce 8800GT Ultra 640 and we can play Crisys at 1600×1200 and many nother games in high resolution, while in reality we own a Single Core CPU 1GB RAM and a GForce 7300GT 256.
That’s Virtualization!
This is M$ doing something for which they lack the expertise to put a proper product out the first time. It normally takes them at least three versions to bring out something that actually works as advertised.
I’ll stick with VMWare I can’t see why I should change to an inferior product.
when they used to make Virtual PC, that was Connectix behind the code so it may be the same people who do virtualization for them now; and they have the expertise for sure.
On running intel code on PPC was definitely not an easy task.
Its going to take Microsoft years before it even comes close to catching Vmware in the Enterprise Market. Vmware ESX 3.5 so much more advanced then anything MS has, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, Vmotion, High Availability, virtual desktop infastructure, to name a few. Vmware has had 5+ years to build support for enterprise class hardware which will take MS quite a long time to do.
After going to the last three Vmworld’s and the Vmware user groups and the Microsoft Virualization user groups I can safely say 90 % of businesses are using Vmware in their production environment. This is a massive project and I can’t see people stopping their efforts and switching to MS unless Vmware totally crashes.
Here’s the direct download link on Microsoft’s site.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/7/157cc83e-9fa8-45b6-939b-dab2e82b7221/6001.17119.071210-1916_amd64fre_Server_en-us-KR1SXFRE_EN_DVD.iso
PxPx is right. Microsoft would have to make something really, really, really incredible to convince the VMware veterans to switch.
I’ve been using VMware for years and I’ve never had a problem with it. I tried VirtualPC, but that was a joke basically.
And as far as actual hardware virtualization goes for server environments, VMware can’t be beat.
Does anyone really trust MS to make a good program these days? I know I don’t. Sad but true.
Vmware, Xen, qemu, virtualbox,parallels. The first 4 run or can be adapted to run on any os and host any os. Want a bet that this will only run on windows and will only run windows? I recently got mac os x running inside vmware on linux (poorly, but I was just messing around with instructions from the net). If M$ made a cross-platform client and enabled DirectX virtualization, then they would actually have something to compete with.
I can’t escape the feeling that virtualization is secondary here, and only a nice bonus (if it works properly). The main event is Win2k8 Server, no matter what people say. I think that Microsoft is too experienced to try to tackle a vastly superior competition outright.