July 2007 - Posts
From its corporate blog Brad Anderson, General Manager of Leading Product Development and Engineering for Microsoft's Management and Solutions Division, discloses planned release period for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 R2, what is also known as "Carmine":
MSD evolution and leadership
"For Windows Server 2008, new management packs/agents for MOM 2005 and SC Operations Manager 2007 will be available in H1. Along those lines, we'll also have a release of System Center Configuration Manager (formerly SMS) and a second release of Virtual Machine Manager to manage virtualized workloads enabled with Windows Server Virtualization. With the release of VMM, System Center can manage the physical and virtual assets. We developed this technology as, increasingly, customers told us they want a single, unified solution for managing both. I've met plenty of customers with physical servers in the datacenter operating at only 15% CPU capacity. SC Virtual Machine Manager assesses and then consolidates suitable server workloads onto virtual machine host infrastructure; this frees up physical resources for repurposing or hardware retirement... "
Public beta for this new SCVMM version is expected for Q1 2008 instead,
CNET News is reporting Microsoft is finally disclosing a date for Windows Server 2008 (formerly codename Longhorn) release: February 27, 2008.
So if Microsoft is going to respect release plan for Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian), its first hypervisor is set for general availability in late August 2008, 13 months from now.
Because of this date, it's more likely Microsoft will release Viridian at same time of VMware conference, VMworld, set in early September since this year. VMware customers could expect release of ESX Server 4.0 as company answer.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the next version of its server operating system, Windows Server 2008, won't formally launch until next year, although A Microsoft representative said that the code for Windows Server 2008 is still set to be finished by the end of the year.
Microsoft said it will launch the product, which it has said will be finalized before the end of the year, at an event in Los Angeles on February 27. The company will also launch Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 at the same event. The company made the announcement at its Worldwide Partner Conference here.
In Israel, rumors say that the launch event will take place during the April 2008 Tech-Ed event.
The new operating system, formerly code-named Longhorn Server, includes the PowerShell scripting language, role-based deployment options as well as network access protection features.
Expect more on Windows Server 2008 on my blog.
(Source)
Most of you reading this blog might have already heard about Microsoft's higher-end virtualization solution that will take on VMware ESX - head to head.
This next OS is currently codenamed "Viridian" and it will be released along with Windows Server 2008. Well not quite "with" it, more likely half a year later, or so they say.
It is rumored that the first release of Viridian won't have all the features it boasts with, not right away. Some of these features that won't be available are “hot add” for the hardware and “live migration” (similar to VMotion).
Viridian will offer a thin "host OS" & virtualization layer (like VMware's VMKernel & Service console). So this "Service Console" will be Windows Core Server (no GUI). This thin virtualization layer will provide much better performance.
Here are some rumored specs:
- 64 bit hardware will be required
- You can have 32 bit & 64 bit child partitions
- Large memory support (> 32GB) within virtual machines
- SMP 2/4/8 way VM
- "Raw" disk access options
- Hot backup of VMs using volume shadow copy
- In the future - live migration, "hot add" of hardware, and up to 64 processors on a Virtual Host
One of the big features Microsoft will tout over VMware ESX is the ability to install 3rd party sw drivers inside windows server core on the parent partition. This is something that VMware ESX cannot do. However, what I am thinking is, maybe you don't want to do this anyway because of potential stability issues caused by 3rd party drivers.
The parent partition and guest OS's communicate on something called the VMBus. This VMBus feature is available only to supported Guests. Those supported guests will be Windows, Novell Suse Linux, and VMs from Zen.
So here is my short list of benefits of using Viridian over VMware ESX:
- Microkernel hypervisor – window server core
- Drivers run within guests
- Drivers must be installed inside parent partition but are available much faster because you can just install the drivers inside the parent partition and child can use that driver and access that hardware, through the VMBus
- Supports more processors that ESX, ESX only 4
- Memory - > 32GB, ESX only 16GB ?
- Hot add cpu, memory, and networking
More on Viridian in future blogs and on my site at www.petri.co.il
(Some of the info on this page was written by David Davis - www.happyrouter.com)