Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Oct 2005 18:57 UTC, submitted by Andrew Bragdon
"Based on my experience with Virtual PC I would say that Virtual Server does not seem to have made significant performance improvements over Virtual PC. However, for many IT consolidation projects the performance penalty could be acceptable. Many older IT applications run on slower hardware and are not used heavily, and so Virtual Server will be a perfect fit. However, for your mission critical apps, you will certainly want to stick to 'real' rather than virtual servers."
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2005-07-08
There is a relatively insignificant market for Windows virtualization. By this I mean virtualizing mixed-mode virtual machines on a windows host. Anyone who is running a machine large enough to worry about utilization, isolation, and availability (not to mention newer stuff like fault tolerance, checkpoint restart, and live migration) is not a Windows customer. They are either running architectures that Windows does not support (mainly SPARC and POWER) or running Solaris/Linux on beefy x86/x86-64 configurations.
There's no question that a significant market exists for running Windows as a virtual machine, providing services like AD, Exchange, and other longterm Windows niches in the enterprise. But this will be done using the virtualization technologies provided by UNIX/Linux vendors. If MS Virtual Server has a viable future, it is limited to the PCAnywhere marketspace.
It remains to be seen if Longhorn Server changes the ballgame for Windows in the datacenter. It seems like the end result of a radical departure from the Windows heritage that started with Windows Sever 2003. To go out on a limb, I would say that Longhorn Server is Microsoft's first operating system designed with servers in mind. Back in the late 1980's a company called Sun Microsystems invented the server, and with Win2k3 and Longhorn Server MS is finally jumping on the bandwagon. There are a number of "roles" for Longhorn that IT departments will rarely use (including virtualization, networking (router), and security (firewall)) because they just don't fit the Windows niche.
Microsoft knows how much their UNIX competitors are investing in virtualization, and how much more hardware support for virtualized environments they have, so it is no surprise that Microsoft isn't investing heavily as well. The MS Virtualization Server seems like a placeholder in their horizontal integration strategy.
warning - astroturfing:
By the way, keep your eyes peeled for IBM Workload Management, formerly codenamed Corrals, which is now available as a limited release for AIX and Linux on POWER. In a nutshell, a Corral is like a Solaris Container, but it additionally supports accounting/quotas for hardware resources and live migration to other LPARS (local or remote). AIX 5.3 ML3 has also been released, with a boat load of new features and fixes, including checkpoint restart throughout the kernel.