Submitted by Jason Perlow takes a look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and concludes: “Even though Hyper-V is still pre-1.0 code, I think Microsoft has done a bang-up job with its hypervisor, and it may just turn this Linux freak into a Windows 2008 junkie for running his own personal virtualization needs. While VMWare’s ESX is still superior on a number of fronts, including its aforementioned VMotion technology and its more powerful cluster management tools, Microsoft has certainly sent a major warning shot across its bow and the bows of the respective Linux vendors, as well.”
“The bad points – as of this writing, you can only run the Hyper-V manager on another Windows 2008 Server machine, In other words, if you want to remotely manage a Hyper-V box, even a stripped-down ‘Core Install’ Hyper-V machine, you will need a Windows 2008 box with the full blown Windows 2008 stack installed.”
Open your wallet boys! You’re about to pay up – again.
Edited 2008-02-15 14:03 UTC
Pay up, or just use remote desktop for free.
Remote desktop won’t work with server core, which gives the ability to not use the Windows GUI. I imagine it includes an RPC style setup that requires 2008 in order to manage remotely.
Or just wait until the Remote Server Administration Tools are finished.
http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/joshs_blog/archive/2007/11/29/ser…
Thom….. I have always been under the impression that you were a windows dork all along?!?!?!
Heh… yeah, I’d say Thom favors Windows. A big chunk of his articles are Windows related.
Anyway, Hyper-V is nothing Linux vendors needs to worry about. There are plenty of robust 3rd party VM solutions, a Xen hypervisor (which Hyper-V is based on) kernel and built-in KVM in mainline.
Microsoft was merely playing catch up in the virtualization field till now.
Edited 2008-02-15 17:23 UTC
I have some good friends on the VM team. HyperV is certainly not based on Xen. The hypercall interface and IO infrastructure seems to be different (at least based on what I can clean from the Xen Wiki entry).
The main advantage of HyperV is that hardware access is run from the Root partitoin (similar to to dom0), so all your hardware will work with existing drivers. Guests communicate with the root through the ‘VM Bus’ transport.
I read about it on the Microsoft virtualization blog and it seems Hyper-V doesn’t contain any code from XEN at all. It is a freshly developed Hypervisor. The only code which XEN team did was write a hypercall adapter which maps XEN style hypercall to Hyper-V style hypercalls so you can run xen VM directly on Hyper-V. The XEN guys also developed Linux version of virtual machine bus and other drivers for linux.
This is a very bad rumours that some people are spreading that Hyper-V is based on XEN. This just shows the hypocrisy in some open source fans where at one side you say give credit where it is due but on the other hand you guys add a clause “give credit where it is due, except if it is Microsoft“.
Edited 2008-02-15 17:58 UTC
Sorry if I’ve mistaken about being based on Xen.
Thats just what I’ve read.
I think I read a post somewhere around here, the other day, which claimed that some distro selected kvm instead of Xen as their base for virtualization due to Xen’s close relationship with Microsoft. So your “slip up” is quite understandable.
Let he who truly understands the virtualization playfield cast the first stone!
Hyper-V is not based on Xen code, but the design for Hyper-V is nearly identical to and certainly based on Xen’s design. That’s why MS funded Cambridge to create Xen, so that they could copy the design. (BTW, MS has done nothing wrong here; you’re supposed to copy ideas from academic research.)
I think OSAlert just tries hard to be and stay as a general and neutral operating systems and IT news site, not taking any sides in the popular flame wars between various IT camps and fan clubs…
Maybe OSAlert should have a new tagline: not just Open Source news…
I’m mostly open source user myself, but I agree with the OSAlert policy that there should be room here for Microsoft and Windows related news too. It is good to have also general and relatively neutral IT news sites that cover both proprietery and open source technologies.
If you want only, say, open source and free software news, there are already many good sites dedicated to such subjects only, like these that I can recommend:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/
http://www.fsdaily.com/
http://www.linux.com/
http://lwn.net/
Edited 2008-02-15 19:58 UTC
I always thought OSAlert stood for Operating System News, since it never really has been specifically about Open Source. Am I wrong in this?
Which is why they have articles on Amiga OS, OS/2, Windows, etc.
As Google’s search for “operating system news” points out, the first link is to here, and the description reads “OSAlert.com informs you about the latest news on a vast range of operating systems, from the well-known mainstream OSes, down to small embedded (but also …”
Edited 2008-02-17 18:39 UTC
OSAlert used to stand for Operating System News. Now it stands for “We’re Slashdot, but with a higher quality of user commentary, and a sane number of users such that each one has a reasonable chance of being heard in the comments section”.
But that is hard to condense into a manageable acronym.
This is at least the second or third go Microsoft have had at getting this right. Lets hope they do make it 3rd time lucky but they are well behind the curve with resect to other VM implementations. The have a lot of ground to catch up on.
However there is the big problem that faces Microsoft in many areas. That is the portability of the VM’s.
With VMWare Server running on Windows or Linux (free download ) or VMWare Fusion ( on OS/X for a pretty small cost) you can make a VM on one system, put it on a portable drive and then run it from any one of three Operating Systems. For me this is a big USP/CSF.
Add to that the fact that it seems to require Server 2008 as a host O/S then it will remain a niche player in the VM arena. Their biggest competitor is VMWare. I can run it with XP as a host if I want to. I looks like Microsoft won’t let me do that with their all singing & dancing new product.
I have at least 20 different VM systems on my server(Dual Quad core Xeon running Linux). I can easily run up different releases of different customer systems as and when needed. For my needs, VMWare fits the bill almost perfectly.
You can actually use Virtual PC, Virtual Server or Virtual PC to create the system and move it to Server 2008 (Its just a .vhd file) so it can even be reopened on a mac I am almost positive that you will be able to run them on Novell SuSe Linux