Submitted by “Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 RC0 hit the Web earlier this week on the road to its scheduled February 2008 release, toting a new Internet Information Services role for the product’s lean and mean Server Core incarnation and a laundry list of small fit-and-finish tweaks. However, the most significant component of the RC0 code drop is one that won’t go gold until three or so months after Server 2008 hits general availability: Microsoft’s brand-new virtualization services feature, also known as ‘Viridian’.”
When is that company just going to give up? I really do wish they would. I mean seriously, just stop please.
-God
Explain yourself.
An oft-made comment that still has nothing to do with the topic at hand…
True.
However, he has a point there. Consider commercial offerings from XenSource and VMWare on the server side, and VMWare and Parallels on the consumer side; and the free (but with commercially supported options as well) offerings from VirtualBox and VMWare; and the open source solutions from Xen, QEMU, VirtualBox, KVM…
Not to mention how the UNIX(tm) certification Leopard achieved will be quite a boon for the adoption of Macs on the enterprise, and there’s VMWare Fusion, Parallels and VirtualBox for Mac OS X as well.
So, it might indeed be too little, too late for Microsoft.
(And if MS happens to fail, I won’t shed half a tear, may I add.)
It is not too late for Microsoft. Microsoft has Virtual PC for consumer edition and Virtual Server for server edition.
What they are indeed doing is building a brand new hypervisor based light-weight technology which will support both 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machines and have features such as virtual bus for high performing IO.
I feel that Microsoft is a little late to the party but I wouldn’t say it is too little too late. Their new product has most of the features that you would need in a server centric environment (with the exception of live migration). However if i read somewhere correctly, Microsoft’s virtualization will have quick migration which is similar to live migration but with a little more downtime.
Might want to read up on what a Hypervisor actually is. A hypervisor is a really thin layer of software that virtualizes everything else on it. (AKA ESX VMkernel virtualizes the Service console which is mistakenly confused as the “OS” itself). Xen uses a linux kernel to basically do what MS is doing as well. That is all called para-virtualization. Read the info on it.
Viridian is just a watered down windows integrated version of VMware Server. Xen kind of fits in a gray area on that. But in my opinion (and note this is my opinion) I think Xen and Viridian at best are more a type2 hypervisor than a type1 despite the wiki. ESX3i would be an example of what a true type1 hypervisor is. Meaning an embedded in hardware solution. Xen I THINK came up with something like that too. I am not sure on that tho.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paravirtualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
MS is the VHS to the rest of the industry’s betamax. They have slick marketing that makes their products look good even if the product itself is not (Vista and ME anyone?)
And the fact that has been missed is the licensing. Anyone who went to VMworld 2007 can tell you about the riots that almost ensued when MS announced their licensing for Viridian. There were lots of boos and they were conveniently parked by the emergency exit. Check it out on VMwares forums. People talk about it in details there.
What does Leopard’s UNIX certification do for anyone? A UNIX cert is really not worth the cost of acquiring it in today’s world since it doesn’t actually mean much. Just about everyone claims POSIX compliance and no one will deny that Macs are unix-y. And yet you’ll still need to port apps to the Mac to really make use of it.
Enterprises care about remote administration, image-based deployment, seamless logon for users at multiple terminals, scalable directory and file servers, and good development tools for LOB apps. Apple can provide all of these things to some extent, but up till now they aren’t as good as Windows for the large enterprise deployment.
VMWare is the real competitor to Microsoft here, not Apple or the Open Source guys. They’re good, so this could be a protracted fight. I just hope it doesn’t end up in the courtroom.
When, for example, you’re dealing with the government, there’s a clear cut difference between “in practice it offers a high degree of compatibility with the UNIX(tm) and POSIX standards” and “it’s certified, period”. The latter wins contracts, while the former is sneezed at.
Actually, that’s almost the whole reason Sun kept Solaris afloat. Sun’s biggest customers are the government from various countries.
I strongly suspect Apple is going after those markets as well. It’s not like Sun gear is cheap, so the perceived expensiveness of the Macs won’t be an issue there, but instead the perceived lack of tradition or dependable expertise in support and hardware reliability (and Macs *are* reliable, but there’s still not a single Mac out there with the uptime of some Sun boxes. The “battle-tested” criteria matters a lot to these customers).
We shall see in a couple year’s time if Apple is indeed planning to overcome those barriers and lure govt. customers. But if that indeed happens, you read it here first
Mate, you do realise that Sun sell Opteron (and Intel soon) servers and workstations? have you looked at the SPARC64 based servers?
Stop making blatantly ignorant statements about things you know nothing about. Sun is not expansive by any stretch of the imagination.
Sun is not expansive by any stretch of the imagination.
I would say Sun is expansive. But most of the new Sun’s products aren’t really expensive anymore.
Kaiwai, come on, you should know me better than this by now. There are no hidden agendas here. I’m not employed by the companies I endorse, and I don’t endorse them to compensate for diminute body parts. =P
Nobody buys Sun gear because it’s cheap, but because it’s reliable and durable. They use actual steel screws instead of plastic tabs (like, uhm, Dell). They use decent chipsets. Their SCSI controllers are top notch.
I wasn’t saying their gear is expensive, I said it isn’t cheap either. It can’t even be cheaper given their build quality.
And you so missed how I used the “perceived” word there. Again, contrast to Dell.
> I wasn’t saying their gear is expensive, I said it isn’t cheap either. It can’t even be cheaper given their build quality.
Please go and visit the Sun site instead of speculating. Some of their low-end gear is quite cheap (we looked at getting a 2U server and their single socket Intel based ones are surprisingly cheap). And yes, it is still the same Sun quality – perhaps the margin on their big iron covers for this.
Consider commercial offerings…
The Silicon Valley rumor mill says that Microsoft is interested in acquiring Citrix (who recently acquired XenSource). I’m interested in how Xen and Viridian could fit together in the same portfolio, or how Citrix fits together with SoftGrid, or what any of this would mean for Microsoft’s relationship with SWSoft (Virtuozzo).
I don’t necessarily think that Microsoft is all that late to the party. Yes, the virtualization gold rush has peaked, and the hype should die down with the possible exception of VMware spinning out from under EMC as its market cap skyrockets past its parent company (isn’t capitalism fun?). But the best available data suggests that less than 15% of enterprise IT shops have adopted x86 virtualization to any extent in a production environment. Most of the initial uptake revenues are yet to be realized.
While it’s never a good idea to dismiss Microsoft, the odds are stacked against them initially. Virtualization will drive the x86 server market toward larger SMP boxes (initially 4 and 8-socket), and Microsoft doesn’t have much experience in scaling to 32 logical CPUs and beyond. Their competitors have significant head-starts and/or loads of mature code.
Viridian has two potential advantages: First, it might feature slicker, more integrated management tools than the competition. But perhaps more importantly, Viridian has the exclusive opportunity to exploit paravirtualized Windows guests to an extent that isn’t possible for their competitors. If Viridian can offer lower overhead when running Windows guests, that will be a significant advantage. However, it’s practically impossible for a hypervisor implementation to beat OS-level implementations like Virtuozzo.
Another uncertainty is whether Windows servers will be a popular target for workload consolidation compared to Linux or Solaris servers. Licensing is more likely to be a factor here than platform technology or the nature of the workloads. Finally, there may be a trend toward OEMs such as Dell and HP providing OOTB hardware virtualization, most likely through partnerships with VMware or the Xen vendors rather than through Microsoft.
As the virtualization love-in fades and the x86 server space adjusts to its new paradigm, the only safe bet is that bigger SMP boxes are coming. Watch out for SWSoft, because one of these days the analysts will warm up to them (or realize they exist). Watch out for Qumranet, which I believe is developing (in stealth mode) a KVM-based clustered mainframe solution based on Intel and Cisco hardware.
Oh, and since virtualization is so last-month, the hype mill has moved on to “green computing”. It’s not easy being green…
However, he has a point there. Consider commercial offerings from XenSource and VMWare on the server side, and VMWare and Parallels on the consumer side; and the free (but with commercially supported options as well) offerings from VirtualBox and VMWare; and the open source solutions from Xen, QEMU, VirtualBox, KVM…
However non of those are written by Microsoft for Microsoft, which I believe will make all the difference in this case. If you’re going to virtualize an MS OS on an MS OS, most people will certainly feel a draw towards the microsoft solution, especially if that solution comes bundled with Server 2008. Also the people writing Viridian have acess not only to the MS server source code, but also to the people who wrote it, meaning they have a far better chance of perfecting the virtualization.
Another advantage is that when the guest OS, host OS and virtuallization technology all comes from the same company, it’s a lot easier to get support, since you’ll avoid the whole finger pointing thing. If you’re an enterprise customer rolling out a major implementation, that is important.
And really virtualization is a fairly new technologay outside the big iron world, and most people haven’t chosen a technology yet, so it’s not like they have to convince most people to migrate away from something to Viridian. They only have to convince people the Viridian is a good solution to whatever problem people are having. And if it’s one thing MS knows how to do, it’s convince people they have a good solution.
I’m no Microsoft fan, but I see no reason why Microsoft has to worry about showing up late to the party.
History is on their side that they’ll be far more likely to achieve at least a break-even point on Viridian as part of their server software lineup than you’ll ever have at bamboozling anyone that’s not on mind-altering substances of ever believing you’re any sort of god.
Microsoft isn’t commercially successful at everything, but they are persistent, far more persistant than most companies, and if they think there’s any future with something, they’ll keep at it until they’re a success, or they’ve concluded that there’s no possible returns on it. They’ve also amply proven that “good enough” is truly “good enough” to get sufficient buy-in to cause daily traffic jams in the Redmond/Bellevue/Seattle area around their campus(es) where tens of thousands work every day, and real estate prices in the area are much higher than they’d be otherwise, assuming there wasn’t such a profitable company with well-paid employees working there.
Finally, integrating this into their server OS software makes it valuable if only from simpler management, and the “check box” value proposition for purchasing: a Pointy Haired Boss will ask, “Does it have virtualization?” there’ll be a “Yup, CHECK!” and that eases the role of those making such decisions and filling out paperwork, compared to filling out another purchase request and dealing with yet another vendor.
If you were any sort of god, your views would indicate that you would have already stomped down Microsoft by now.
“the most significant component … is one that won’t go gold until three or so months”
Sounds like Vista.
I don’t get it… what is the significant Vista component that didn’t come out until months after Vista’s release?
>> I don’t get it… what is the significant Vista component that didn’t come out until months after Vista’s release?
what about winfs lol
Edited 2007-09-28 21:26 UTC
That was canceled years ago
I think what he was getting at is that this situation reminds him of Vista in that, all the significant components such as WinFS were first delayed, then dropped.
What a beautiful name for a subsystem. Guess it’s just bound to attract viruses or something.
Viriidian 🙂
Nah, they’ve just been watching Star Trek too much.
The author of the article actually liked it. I don’t see why people should pay 3000+ dollars for ESX once windows virtualization is released (especially if you run Windows OS in guests).
I’ll agree that MS appears to be going in a wise direction by including this technology.
But “Viridian”?? C’mon. It sounds an awful lot like “virus ridden”, and I’d think their highly paid marketing department would have the sense to avoid that connotation.
Maybe if Windows Server 2003 wasn’t actually a good product, and Viridian wasn’t a relatively well-known word already, that might matter.
Except that this is a Windows 2008 article and… well, you’re right. It is a relatively well-known word compared to, say, cytoplasm.
Seriously. If you want to argue that Windows 2003 is a step above past Windows servers, I’m with you. But their naming on this one sucks.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+viridian&btnG=Go…
Eventually it will be known as “Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization Technology Virtual Edition for Microsoft Windows Server 2008” or something reasonable like that.
You need to throw in “framework” and “infrastructure”
I don’t know the dropped code. Does it support multiple OS, can it do a vmotion like move? There are a lot of reasons why you should get esx. Given the price of several pieces of commercial software for some systems, I even think 3K is cheap.
Buy yourself HP-UX and you know why. Many mandatory pieces (bonding, a compiler etc) cost you a lot.
As I replied in other post, Viridian will support many Linux variants, mainly server editions. It will also only support server editions of Windows.
Microsoft is working with XenSource and Novell to make the overall virtualization of Linux better on Viridian.
Btw even Virtual server from Microsoft supports Linux. There are downloadable additions from Microsoft website for Linux.
I’m predicting that Viridian supports Linux as well as Windows supports POSIX, it is a “check box item” for managers but over time there will be “issues” that mean once you’re on a Viridian host then only a Windows client will run flawlessly. Similar things have happened before.
Consider this, remember when Borland used to have the greatest mindshare in the Win32 development market. The n Microsoft started to compete with Visual Studio. Then later there was a disagrement between Microsoft and Borland (with Microsotf holding all the cards) resulting in a delay in licensing Win32/MFC for Borland. Crippled Borland’s ability to compete and Visual Studio took over the market (at that time Visual Studio was the inferior product).
Likewise, the Linux support in Viridian will serve to get you on to a Windows host, and then as time goes by the only way to get a smooth experience on Viridian will be with a Windows client. I say, just use VMware instead and your strategic future is your own to decide.
thanks for the clarification.
Still as mentioned in other posts: the maturity and track record of vmware gives a better feeling.
Anyone knows if vmotion style moves is possible? How is the resource-division handled? I really cannot coment om the product as it’s now what we use here.
Of course, I coud try looking it up but hands on stories is something I trust more in this case.
Edited 2007-09-30 09:48
I don’t see why people should pay 3000+ dollars for ESX once windows virtualization is released (especially if you run Windows OS in guests).
Because Viridian is only equatable to VMware Server, hasn’t been around as long as VMware Server, isn’t as proven and Viridian has the inevitable licensing issues.
If you run Linux, there’s simply no point because the APIs aren’t going to be available to you outside of Windows.
This is not true. Microsoft is already working with XenSource to make Linux virtual machines run faster and better and with integrated virtual devices for faster IO.
For more information, check out this interview with the senior program manager on the Virtualization team:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=343783
Check out the second result when you google “microsoft viridian”, it is “Microsoft Cuts Core Features From Viridian”. Seems to be a common theme with them. First they’ll promise that a future technology will fix all your woes so you shouldn’t switch to any competing products, and then when it finally comes out the product’s feature set is cut to buggary. Sounds like a form of “bait and switch” to me.
CrazyDude1,
Will Veridian be able to live migrate vm’s?
no
Will Veridian be able to run a totally separate vm yet still run it rootless?
no
Will Veridian be a bare metal install thus have complete control over the hypervisor?
no
Will Verdian even be an actual product?
no it will be a service that is paid for on top of already paying for the os!
I don’t see how anyone could justify NOT paying $3000 for ESX if they want the real advantages of having a virtual envoronment.
In the current CTP it’s not even possible to boot Ubuntu Linux using Vidirian. I hope they have time to fix this before RTM, and of course, to be useful, it needs not only to boot but to be reasonably performant.