Microsoft, VMware reveal next-gen virtualisation

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:32

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft and VMware have each released more details of their upcoming virtualisation products.

In Microsoft's case, the new information amounts to little more than a product name: Hyper-V Server. The company originally used the codename Viridian, and more recently referred to it as Windows Server Virtualisation. The new name reflects the fact that Hyper-V can virtualise operating systems other than Windows.

Hyper-V is still expected to ship within 180 days of Windows Server 2008. While the company has a major launch event scheduled for February 27, 2008, at this stage it is not clear whether Server 2008 will be ready to ship on that day.

Several major server suppliers will deliver Hyper-V on their hardware, but it will also be available directly to customers for $US28 per server. The number of virtual machines that can run on one piece of hardware will not be limited by the licence. Furthermore, changes to Windows Server licensing effectively switches it to a concurrent basis, so an organisation that never runs more than say 100 virtual servers would only need 100 operating system licences, even if it installed Windows Server on a larger number of VM images to allow for different workload mixes.

Microsoft also announced System Center Virtual Machine Manager to aid the deployment and management of virtual machines.

VMware's announcement was more concrete: a public beta release of its forthcoming VMware Server 2.

New features of the free virtualisation product include a web-based management interface, support for more than 30 guest operating systems (including Windows Vista and Server, RHEL and Ubuntu), Virtual Machine Interface support (VMI enhances communication between the guest operaating systems and the virtualisation layer), and support for high-speed USB 2.0 devices.

Also new is support for up to 8G of RAM per VM and up to two virtual SMP processors. 64-bit guest OSes are supported on appropriate hardware.

The final release is expected sometime in 2008.

Unlike Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware Server runs under a host operating system (Windows or Linux). Another VMware product - ESX Server - runs directly on the hardware.

Earlier this week, Oracle released Oracle VM, a virtualisation product based on Xen.