Microsoft and Red Hat Team Up On Virtualization 168
mjasay writes "For years Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge its patent portfolio as a precursor to interoperability discussions. Today, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. The nuts-and-bolts of the agreement are somewhat pedantic, providing for Red Hat to validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and other technical support details. But the real crux of the agreement is what isn't there: patents. Red Hat has long held that open standards and open APIs are the key to interoperability, even as Microsoft insisted patents play a critical role in working together, and got Novell to buy in. Today, Red Hat's vision seems to have won out with an interoperability deal heavy on technical integration and light on lawyers."
It is a good sign (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It is a good sign (Score:4, Insightful)
IF Red Hat had squat for mature virtualization, it might make a difference. RH is behind, way behind, and it's a nice gesture, good for the press, and RH has lost out to VMWare, Novell's Xen product line, Citrix's XenServer, and even xVM/VB.
It sounds sweet, but it's a meaningless sort of announcement in the face of a ton of mature competition.
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It's possible that libvirt might mature, might evolve, might go some place. Like all 'marketshares', it's late, buggy, not widely supported by communities and is unlikely to gain significant groundswell as there are at least five viable competitors already at work and maturing. I like RH, its community, and its other significant projects. But it ignored virtualization until it's now a game of serious catch-up where others have invested long and hard. The Microsoft cooperation is significant, but given the c
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We'll see. It would be nice if they got off their dead asses and did something with the acquisition. They're four years behind the market. Only fanbois seem to defend silly behavior like that. Let's see, six market competitors, one with five years, two with four years, one with 2.5 years, and SunComeLately. Then RH. I wish them the very best of luck. It's a tough VM world out there. Just because it's RH and Linux KVM means little these days.
NOCs with 1000s of servers running tens of thousands of VMs, now th
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They're four years behind the market.
Frankly, I haven't been overly impressed with the speed of the market. What's it now, three, four years and VMWare still can't deliver a Linux VIClient?
In the mid to long term the ability to leverage OS developments as foundation for the virtualization will be far more important, trying to make hypervisors into operating systems in their own right is going exactly in the wrong direction. While it's understandable why the licensing issues make that road desirable for clos
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Statistically, your impression of the speed of the market has left you behind. VMWare's lack of a VIClient for LInux notwithstanding (think demand in a hideously Windows world), VMWare and Xen have done an interesting job of grabbing attention and mindshare.
In my mind, the operating system model is in the process of being upended, and virtualization and the reasoning behind it will change the face of computing in a few years anyway. Look to organizations like FastScale and others to strip the crap out of OS
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Didn't say one was necessarily better than the other, if you'll read my post. RH hasn't been a leader. They're playing ketchup right now.
As far as my 'ignorance' is concerned, take a real look at which each vendor is offering. Sun is also way behind in mindshare, and perfection of their offering, while solid, hasn't exactly captured mainstream fancy. Xen performance is absolutely different as currently provided/supported by each vendor, and that's well documented.
Novell's Xen seems to be slowest, while Citr
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He he....
No man, this means microsoft is now on its knees. And Novell is proven to have done it the wrong way and now look like idiots.
A great day for FOSS!
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No man, this means microsoft is now on its knees.
No, it just means that Microsoft is willing to do profitable business with anyone - so long as it really is profitable - and is not out on that mythical hunt to chair all those bearded FLOSS hackers to death. If customers want to run Windows guests in RedHat host, sure, why not - they still have to buy licenses for those guests, so it's a win. And if they want to run Linux guests in a Windows host, even if it's a free Hyper-V Server, it's still publicity for the product, and more admins familiar with it. It
Re:It is a good sign (Score:5, Insightful)
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Very well put.
Re:It is a good sign (Score:4, Funny)
another step forward for Open Source and a sign that Microsoft can adapt.
That's no moon!
Re:It is a good sign (Score:5, Informative)
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Assuming that Moonlight is the Death Star...
Good point!
Or to quote Woody Allen (Score:5, Funny)
"The lion and the lamb will lay down together, but the lamb won't get much sleep."
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I have another one:
Share your fire with a man, he'll be warm for a night. Set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Re:It is a good sign (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why you would want to run Linux under the MS Hypervisor is the strange question, unless you just wanted a Linux "sandbox" for some reason. I suspect to get the MS stamp of approval for Windows under Linux they required the reciprocal agreement from RH.
Its not that strange. My first home linux servers ran as VMs under windows, primarily for comfort reasons. I've since gotten comfortable enough that its now linux on linux.
And at work, we have a linux spamassassin VM running on a windows server, simply because
Re:It is a good sign (Score:4, Insightful)
That solution is quite interesting, because its the sort of thing that a lot of people were expecting to happen - virtual images being used as black-box applications.
I love the idea of being able to download a webserver in a box, or a caching HTTP proxy server. There are many other applications which would be nice to see provided like this. Of course in my case I would be hosting them on Linux, but I guess whatever host machine you use is irrelevant so long as you understand it and can support it.
Of course I'm a little biased when it comes to spam filtering [mail-scanning.com], but I hope the idea of custom VM images catchs on more generally.
There are downsides such as the overhead of emulating a whole machine for a single service, but I'm sure the benefits outweigh them if you have spare host capacity (*2 for redundancy)
I'm curious though, did you configure the guest yourself, or find it as a pre-rolled virtual machine image?
Re:It is a good sign (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious though, did you configure the guest yourself, or find it as a pre-rolled virtual machine image?
I ultimately rolled it myself. Partly as a learning exercise, and partly because none of the pre-rolled VMs were quite what I needed. And I didn't know enough to reconfigure them to work the way I needed. (Although now, having rolled my own, I probably could customize a pre-rolled VM.)
There are downsides such as the overhead of emulating a whole machine for a single service, but I'm sure the benefits outweigh them if you have spare host capacity (*2 for redundancy)
Yeah, the overhead of emulating a whole machine is the downside, but the advantages in terms of flexibility, service isolation, and simplicity are clear.
Re:It is a good sign (Score:5, Funny)
I've since gotten comfortable enough that its now linux on linux.
LOL action :D
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Why you would want to run Linux under the MS Hypervisor is the strange question, unless you just wanted a Linux "sandbox" for some reason.
I've seen a few places that were Microsoft shops - AD, Exchange, SharePoint and all - but still used Squid as a proxy, and/or Apache for at least part of the intranet. A lot of admins seem to simply prefer these over MS options (ISA in particular is rather hated, or so I hear), and do not trust them to run well enough on Windows boxes.
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another step forward for Open Source and a sign that Microsoft can adapt.
Maybe. But I have three words for Red Hat: watch your six.
But I still don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a lighter note, wonder what the VMware guys are thinking about all of this - it's basically the end of what has always been their niche, except for Parallels but they weren't as datacenter-ready as VMware and were established mainly to make virtualization software that can run OS/2.
Re:But I still don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
Two words: Microsoft Exchange.
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You just linked to an article complaining about Exchange 1.0. Seriously, what the fuck? They've release AT LEAST 7 versions since then!
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This article was clearly either written back sometime in 1990s, or by someone who's still clinging to those "good old times". Seriously, by 2009, if your mail client can't properly handle MIME and HTML mail, it sucks, and you need to find a better one (because no-one else will care that you can't read their mail - after all, everyone else can!).
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Or, on the desktop, name any Adobe product - Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign._
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In lieu of your comment, I'd like to propose a name change to GINP (GINP Is Not Photoshop).
Seriously, I agree with you. There is definitely a lot of work ahead, namely in the UI department, although that is a discussion for another time and place...
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I didn't say that Photoshop isn't overrated, or that it isn't overpriced. I don't know that either of these allegations are true, but I wouldn't rule them out.
But, the fact is, and it sounds like you agree, that Photoshop has quite a few features that the Gimp doesn't, features that a number of us find useful. And even if I agree with you that 90% of users don't need these features, that leaves 10% of us who do.
And this is not to mention the rather shop-worn UI issue.
Again, I love the Gimp and have nothing
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Does Photoshop still lock you in to a MDI interface? [1]
(Bear with me, I haven't touched PS in what seems like a decade.)
[1] And for my next trick, I'll talk about ATM machines!
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Not only that, but lots of businesses run SPECIFIC software packages where switching over is a $100k+ expense just in the data conversion. And of course there's the little issue that yeah, Linux provides plenty of alternatives for your average desktop user, but not your whacky business programs that places tend to use. I've still yet to see a Linux or F/OSS product meant to do CAMA (Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal) functions, or manage building permits and subdivision planning, handle the calculating and
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Most of the software that I work with has both a client and a server portion, of which both must run on a Windows server. The ones that use only a database are tied specifically to MS SQL Server, which is itself Windows only.
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Two words: Microsoft Exchange.
Better still: Exchange Microsoft.
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...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
Two words: Microsoft Exchange.
Two more: legacy applications.
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...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide,
No, there isn't. Perhaps there should be, but there isn't.
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...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
The big need is for situations like this. The hospital where my wife works has RedHat based servers for imaging acquisition and viewing and MS/Cerner for business (booking etc). Getting effective integration for the two has been a PITA because of Microsoft. Hopefully this will change.
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Impressive, but it sounds like you picked the hard way to do it. Did you try the ERP app under WINE for example (or is it not possible for some reason)?
Oh, and what is a "boxen"?
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Oh, and what is a "boxen"?
-1 Bleeding Pedant. ;)
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Ah, yeah that sounds about right. Sometimes I wonder why administration is even allowed to make IT decisions. That's the sort of thing that resulted in us standardising on IE6 on Windows XP SP2 (no SP3 here!) with CA eTrust 8 for antivirus (and no protection at all on servers!).
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You do rock. I wish that /. had a "Favorite" button.
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Re:But I still don't understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's because of the "almost". There are a lot of people who, right or wrong, believe that they can only get by with whatever Windows-only "Program X" provides. For these people, "close" is not "close enough". When the gearheads who like Linux need to support these applications, virtualizing a Windows instance on Linux makes a lot of sense.
Even for a pure MS shop, virtualization introduces a lot of flexibility, so that too would be a reason to virtualize.
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We're virtualising at work. We have sixty servers running a mix of Solaris 9, Solaris 10, RHEL/CentOS and Windows (for one proprietary app that's intrinsic to the platform ... we run it under Wine where we can). Some boxes are flat-out, some boxes are 8-core beasts running one Java program because it won't play nice having multiple instances on the same box. We have 2.5 TB of disk space, of which about 500 GB is used. Similar stats for memory. "We are not Rackspace" is the catchphrase for why virtualising i
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Because people, especially bussiness people that sign checks, still like (or dont know any better) some MS products.
Some other people have vested investment in MS based things and they are not going (nor they should if the industry can prevent it by DOING ITS JOB) to spend it all over again so that they can feel nice about themselves.
Re:But I still don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given...there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide
Even if that were true, in practice companies don't just swap out production environments because alternatives potentially exist. What works well for you may be problematic in even a slightly different environment. Others have mentioned apps for which OSS interoperability isn't there yet, and I'd add Group Policies and other AD centric tech to the list (although I admittedly haven't checked out recent versions of Samba lately, so maybe I'm wrong on that). I'm as big of an OSS advocate as there is, but part of advocating effectively is knowing where limitations exist and dealing with them rationally rather than sugar-coating them. I agree with the gist of what you're saying though, and there are a lot of shops that could lower TCO by exploring the alternatives.
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There are a lot of "niche" products that run on Windows without an open source alternative. Take a look at "The Raiser's Edge" It is the number one fundraising software in the world and is used by non-profits of all shapes and sizes, from the Red Cross on down. There isn't a FOSS equivalent. For the little niche world I work in, take a look at The Museum System. It is the number one collections management database used by museums all over the world, from the Tate, to the Guggenheim, Smithsonian, etc.
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Handy hint: Wine runs quite a lot of this sort of niche vertical-market app very nicely and has powerful ambitions to run the rest. Worth a try.
Of course, this requires accepting that you will get zero vendor support should anything go wrong - not a tradeoff many organisations are prepared to take.
Re:But I still don't understand... (Score:4, Informative)
...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
No. There aren't. Period. There is no FOSS alterantive for LOTs of things, and even when there is switching is cost prohibitive and pointless.
accounting: nope. And migrating to a linux alternative even if one existed would be monstrously expensive for any business of size.
photoshop/illustrator: nope. sure there is the gimp etc, which is all fine and good. But you need to integrate with a workflow where you are exchanging files with other businesses etc you have to use the tools they are using.
microsoft access, filemaker pro, 4D... millions of highly custom applications exist for these to fit business needs. Even if an alternative "application building framework" exists on Linux, the cost of migrating and reimplementing these applications is prohibative. Companies that rely on these won't even consider switching until FM, 4D, etc run on linux natively.
sql server - lots of businesses rely heavily on this. And even if postgresql or mysql, etc could do the job, again, its a massive amount of work to migrate from one to the other.
exchange - nothing needs to be said.
visual studio - sure linux alternatives exist, and you can even just use vi or notepad, but VS2008 is REALLY good.
The above isn't a small list of niche products or categories that only affect a handful of businesses. Millions of businesses rely on multiple of them.
Oh, and at home, there are games blocking a lot of people from leaving windows.
Re:But I still don't understand... (Score:4, Informative)
Accounting: I'm surprised that there are no real FOSS contenders in this space; at least on the low end, such packages are perfectly suited to a subscription model (hey, those tax tables don't update themselves.) This is a niche, however, where people probably feel better paying for a bit of piece of mind (nobody ever expects an audit...)
Photoshop/Illustrator: GIMP is 90% there for 90% of people. Opens PSD files, so it would seem to fit into most folks' workflow. I'm honestly not sure where Inkscape is at, but it's only going to get better.
Access/etc: If your business depends on Access or something similar, you're almost better off running it on Windows. When you scale it, you can scale it onto a better platform.
SQL Server: I think you'll find that Postgres can 'do the job' significantly better than SQL server under almost all workloads. Mysql is, of course, a running joke amongst anyone who knows what they're talking about. Obviously, if you're going to migrate to a new DBMS, there's going to be pain. SQL 2005 to Postgres is no more or less painful than Oracle 9i to SQL 2005.
Exchange: There are umpteen trillion unix-based (OSS, free beer, AND payware) 'groupware' suites. Most of the better ones have an Outlook plugin if you're still using Office.
Visual Studio: The choice of an IDE is INCREDIBLY subjective. I have /never/ liked Visual Studio, although that's not to say that others aren't more productive using it than using any other IDE. Developers, ultimately, need to be able to choose their own IDE; as long as it integrates with the higher level workflow and speaks the same language dialect as the rest of the team, who really cares? I know some people who swear by Eclipse (which I tried at the start of last year and didn't like much,) and some people who won't code using anything except nvi. For what it's worth, I find that Code::Blocks has a great feature:heft ratio.
You're right about one thing, though: games. At home, the ONLY use I have for windows of any stripe is the (sadly, more than) occasional reboot into XP64 to play Farcry 2 or Fallout 3 or the depressingly bad port of Saints Row 2. This will change, however, and not in the direction that most people are hoping. Consoles are already in the process of murdering PC gaming to the point where all we'll get given to us are bad console ports (Saints Row 2 was the most egregious example, on a 4-way 3.2GHz machine with a GTX260 the framerate fluctuates between 3 and 85fps) loaded up with DRM and other nonsense. Of the three games I mentioned, only Fallout 3 considered the PC to be a first-tier platform, and that's most likely because of Bethesda's history as a PC development shop and the fact that the Fallout 3 engine is a direct descendant of the Morrowind engine.
After the next generation of consoles, I'd expect gaming on Windows and Linux to be roughly at parity, and I'm not expecting anyone to port too many more games to Linux. Wine will run the bad ports well enough, and there will be a thriving third party aftermarket for keyboard/mouse connectivity kits for consoles.
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No. There aren't. Period. There is no FOSS alterantive for LOTs of things, and even when there is switching is cost prohibitive and pointless.
accounting: nope. And migrating to a linux alternative even if one existed would be monstrously expensive for any business of size.
photoshop/illustrator: nope. sure there is the gimp etc, which is all fine and good. But you need to integrate with a workflow where you are exchanging files with other businesses etc you have to use the tools they are using.
because the gimp can't open photoshop files
microsoft access, filemaker pro, 4D... millions of highly custom applications exist for these to fit business needs. Even if an alternative "application building framework" exists on Linux, the cost of migrating and reimplementing these applications is prohibative. Companies that rely on these won't even consider switching until FM, 4D, etc run on linux natively.
sql server - lots of businesses rely heavily on this. And even if postgresql or mysql, etc could do the job, again, its a massive amount of work to migrate from one to the other.
exchange - nothing needs to be said.
visual studio - sure linux alternatives exist, and you can even just use vi or notepad, but VS2008 is REALLY good.
Any developer that depends on an IDE to write code should not call him/herself a developer.IDES are something that linux is not short of, there are so many IDEs for linux, proprietary or F/OSS, I'm sure a developer could find one to work with
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because the gimp can't open photoshop files
is the gimp 100% compatible with photoshop files? No, didn't think so.
Any developer that depends on an IDE to write code should not call him/herself a developer.
Who said one "depends" on it to write code? What if they simply depend on it to write better code faster? You know, like any good tool makes any professional job go better and faster.
IDES are something that linux is not short of, there are so many IDEs for linux, proprietary or F/OSS, I'm sure a developer c
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I don't know why you'd run Windows on top of Linux (or vice-versa) outside of test-dev (a sales laptop running a 3-tier application on 3 VMs via VMWare Player or Workstation for example) Server-based hypervisors run on bare metal.
This is certainly a big step forward for what are otherwise niche also-ran hypervisors. I'm certainly glad to see competition to VMWare, but there's still nothing that actually comes close to it in terms of real-world performance. (specifically stability and manageability)
One featu
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If one of the competing virtualization products gave you the ability to mirror local storage between two physical servers, that would be a killer feature for branch/small office settings where the budget doesn't justify a SAN.
XtraVirt Virtual SAN [xtravirt.com] is free and does exactly what you want.
Yes, it runs as a VM, but it can run as a VM on multiple ESX servers and provide redundancy and mirroring. You essentially allocate almost all the local storage on the ESX machine to the XVS VM, then carve out iSCSI LUNs from it, which the ESX server uses as storage for all the other VMs.
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Why *wouldn't* you run windows on Linux if you had the chance?!
From a seasoned VMware ESX admin speaking from an operational standpoint;
First, I'll explain a few things. Servers today are so mind-bogglingly powerful that even with virtualisation overhead they're easily capable of providing more than enough grunt for hordes of enterprise crapware that, due to shoddy programming or testing, would otherwise be sitting on $7000-worth of barely-utilised tin since the support agreement stipulates "we refuse to su
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That's power and flexibility.
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Well, I hope this somewhat shorter post won't not waste any more of your precious time, Mr. AC :)
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One word: Outlook
There just isn't anything in Linux that comes close in a corporate environment, period. I could have everyone in my office on Linux and/or Macs if it wasn't for that. It doesn't run (very well or at-all) under Wine or CrossOver, and there is no native Linux alternative that works reliably (or at all with Exchange 2007).
Evolution tried, and failed. I don't really blame them though- Microsoft will probably NEVER release their internals for the Outlook/Exchange marriage, and will continually c
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Evolution tried, and failed. I don't really blame them though- Microsoft will probably NEVER release their internals for the Outlook/Exchange marriage, and will continually change the way they communicate just to throw off any competition that tries.
Actually, they've publically released (without any fanfare whatsoever) the entire Exchange server protocol. And there's always Exchange ActiveSync (though that'd have to be a paid addon, since they don't license that for free).
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I used to manage 10 windows machines, some old, some new. Each had their own box. I wanted to buy one big box, and run all the build OS's - plus Linux - on the same box. Voila: (in theory) no new machines, just load up another OS on the multi-core and away we go.
I wonder if MS are using this as a way of getting at Xen and VMware?
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I may end up setting up Windows on top of Linux for a local florist so that he can run stupid greeting card software and use the many floral-related sites which demand IE (like teleflora's ordering system) without endangering his computer. Just jump back to the last snapshot when it gets stunk up...
The Thorn that is Virtualisation (Score:5, Informative)
It's a real kick in the teeth for Novell. This is a perfectly straightforward deal of certifying each other's systems on their virtual platforms that Novell couldn't get right. In practice, Microsoft is providing no help whatsoever to Novell in running Windows on their virtual platform (which I don't think Red Hat is expecting itself really) and they sold themselves down the river by agreeing to some elaborate coupon scheme that saw SLES servers totally surrounded by installations of Windows Server and AD domains. I don't think they even realised what they'd signed up to. At least Red Hat gets some marketable press out of this without conceding anything.
Site Licenses (Score:2)
It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely.
Does this really matter to MS though? I've worked at two types of companies. The small ones, handled licensing on a computer by computer basis, and tried to keep it all documentation manually. These folks never had any problems with forced upgrades, as they new to buy computers without the OS, and also didn't have large enough IT needs to bother with virtualisation.
The larger ones found this to be too cumbersome and risky and instead have site licenses with Microsoft, and the amount that MS gets paid has ab
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It also gives the potential to outflank Windows technology by bypassing it in the virtual machine itself and surrounding Windows with non-Windows systems. Additionally, ubiquitous, freely available virtualisation is going to end up ruling, and ultimately that means an open source host running something like KVM.
"Free" does not necessarily imply "OSS", and, for example, Microsoft Hyper-V Server is "free as in beer" - probably precisely so as to avoid the situation you describe.
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They have incorporated support for Hyper-V virtualization in their operating systems going back to Windows 2000 SP4, and are making a major push into all areas of virtualization. In fact, of all of the virtualization vendors they are the only one pushing a true 360 strategy that includes not just platform virtualization, but also application virtualization (via their App-V/Softgrid product, the market leader in this space), presentation virtualization, and desktop virtualization.
[/quote]
This is false
2 minute summary of Hyper-v Vs Xen Vs VMware (Score:5, Informative)
Theres an interesting read over at the 360 blog here [blogspot.com]., which covers the debate/fight between these 3 giants quite nicely.
AG
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- VMWare is nice, but too damned expensive
- Xen is basically free, or we can pay for better support, but is rough around the edges
- Microsoft's solution... well, we simply don't trust Microsoft not to lock us in, even if it's free
So we run Xen. Maybe we'll upgrade to the commercial version someday when I have the spare cash laying around not being used.
That Windows VM validation script in full... (Score:2)
#!/bin/perl
print STDERR "Buggy as hell.\nRFC compliance limited.\n"
Pedantic? (Score:2)
"Pedantic" doesn't mean what you think it means. The agreement isn't pedantic but this post is pedantic.
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"Pedantic" doesn't mean what you think it means. The agreement isn't pedantic but this post is pedantic.
As in "you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Seriously though, I suspect they meant "pedestrian."
parse error (Score:2)
Having a bit of trouble parsing this. Does this mean "validate" as in Red Hat is going to test Windows on its virtualization products or "validate" as in the VM will be responsible for ensuring that the copy of Windows is legitimate?
Redhat win? No. Microsoft is evolving. (Score:2)
Remember when IBM was the Microsoft of it's day? Hated and reviled just like Microsoft? Ultimately companies that create standards eventually become companies that contribute to them. The transition is never that simple of course, there's always a bunch of FUD and kicking and screaming but once reality sets in you realize that you have to co-exist. Once IBM learned this lesson they became ok guys and then Microsoft became the bad guy.
I think Microsoft has finally realiz
itsatrap? (Score:2)
Where is the "itsatrap" tag? Is this /. or what?
Re:Et tu, RedHat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Et tu, RedHat? (Score:4, Insightful)
We are 3+ years on after the signing of the Novell/MSFT deal and there has been zero legal action by Ballmer and his cronies.
Nobody in the know were really worried about actual legal action. What people were actually worried about was that Microsoft's patent threats might be scaring away people from FOSS.
What the Novell/Microsoft deal primarily did was to lend credibility in the eyes of some people that to use many FOSS packages, you needed a patent license from Microsoft. The same applies to Linspire, Xandros, and the rest of those that actually signed patent deals with Microsoft over FOSS.
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Don't worry... satan will not let this work, he doesn't do cold.
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Well, okay. Humor me... read the reply again slowly, thinking to yourself that I must be writing with tongue in cheek.
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Just a tip: complaining about how you were moderated will only invite undesirable moderation on your reply.
Yeah. You're suppose to do that in your initial post "I know I'll get modded down for this, but ..."
People love a martyer more than they love a whiner.
Re:Take *that* Novell! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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What are you talking about?
Re:Red Hat naming scheme. OT (Score:2)
Does Red Hat still name the releases after items in the game Tribes? I haven't used RH since v5.2 (shrike) If I remember correctly.
I thought Shrike was named after the Shrike from the Hyperion novels.
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My memory might be a bit vague, but I am sure that there were other names that indicated a "Tribes" background like Spinfuser.
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Here is the truth about the naming scheme.
http://www.smoogespace.com/documents/behind_the_names.html [smoogespace.com]
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You have to subscribe to MSDN - the CDs aren't allowed to be given away (which makes sense, since you pay a vastly reduced amount for them in exchange for that tradeoff). No other legal way.