Microsoft to Support Linux in Virtual Server 399
zaxios writes "Techworld is reporting that Microsoft has announced support for running Linux on their virtualization software, Virtual Server 2005. From the article: '[Microsoft] can't compete against VMware without support for other operating systems.' Perhaps the significance of this is that Microsoft has acknowledged Linux as an OS people might want to use, which seems an upgrade from its previous status as a communist cancer."
Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoyed my fun little christmas hoax [komar.org] - help me do it for real in 2005! ;-) [komar.org]
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Funny)
- First they ignore you
- then they laugh at you
- then they fight you
- then you win
- My corollary: then they say they were with you all along
I thought we were at GhandiCon 3 with Microsoft but this has shades of GhandiCon 5 (my corollary).Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, what comes out of their mouths, is not what really happens. Or the results are not any where near what people EXPECTed. They have their own language and it's a dialect of marketing-speak. IMO.
Still at GhandiCon 3 IMHO.
LoB
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't.
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe, like BASIC, Bill keeps insisting Microsoft keep its hands on those "special" projects. Heck, he's probably still got.... I was going to mention MS-Bob code hidden in Windows but then I rememberd that stupid paperclip character... See how Bill works?
Anyways, I think the VirualPC purchase was all about letting one PC run more than one server process when running on Wind
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:3, Funny)
I thought we were at GhandiCon 3 with Microsoft but this has shades of GhandiCon 5 (my corollary).
For obvious reasons, I think they want to skip step 4.
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's crap that you point to a five year old quote as if nothing bad was said about linux in the mean time. That smacks to me of professional level spinning.
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Interesting)
1) So that they can have a thin client server that works. Run images of full OSes on virtual machins, and a low end machine with just enough juice to run Remote Desktop can now be use quite well.
2) To resolve any problem they will ever have with backward compatibility.
With VPC, MS no longer needs to release new versions of every application they ever made just to upgrade the OS. On my system VPC gets 80%-90% processing speed compared to the native CPU. They could do some work on memory and HD speeds, but that will come. This means that as long as Visual Studio runs at decent speeds inside of VPC, MS doesn't have to upgrade it at the same time as the OS.
With VPC MS doesn't even have to stay on the same hardware platform. If a new (or old) CPU takes a huge leap of speed due to some breakthrough, and it becomes significantly faster than the x86/AMD64 platform, MS can move all windows software to the new platform by porting Windows, and VPC. This would immediatly make them a player in the new market.
Buying VPC was the smartest thing I have seen MS do in years.
Re:Balmer takes 5 years to change his mind (Score:5, Informative)
And Bill Gates comments about "open source communists" was last year.
Your point then is what?
First post?
If Ballmer's comments have any meaning at all, it means Microsoft's virtualization project will be devoted to breaking Linux when it runs on a Microsoft host so MS can claim Linux is broken.
previous comments? (Score:5, Insightful)
This was said five and four years ago (respectively). Sheesh - you know companies can change mindsets....Even a stone can change with time.
Re:previous comments? (Score:5, Funny)
Sir, you give me hope with that comment about my parent-in-law. Thank You.
And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:4, Interesting)
Asserting that the GPL is cancerous and free software advocates are communists is not.
The simple truth is, Microsoft (or, at least, Bill Gates) likely never truly believed either of those things. They said them because they thought that if people believed it, it would confer a business advantage for them. For another example of this kind of behavior, I refer you towards Bill's obvious flip-floppery on the issue of software patents [com.com].
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? Because it was hurting software developers and by the lack of monetary compensation, it prevented good software from being written. The irony is that Bill himself said that the best way to learn how to write good software is to read source code produced by others.
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:3, Funny)
Hey now, don't count out Dvorak!
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying don't forgive. I'm saying don't forget - which apparently agrees with your sentiment.
You're right that nobody but Bill Gates has insight in to Bill Gate's mind. The best we can go by is what Bill has said or written (and he hasn't been shy about that). So to some extent we are forced to take what any individual, including Bill Gates, says or writes at fa
Re:And I have a copy of DNK Forever to sell you... (Score:3, Insightful)
microsoft has done nothing to indicate it's going to change its ways. i don't blame it - it's a driven beast that will do whatever it possibly can to grow and dominate - but that doesn't mean i have to like it or forgive it.
2) lets not forget all the good that Billy has also done. I would list it all, but I don't ha
oblig (Score:5, Funny)
So let me get this straight (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OT: EVIL communism (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the US is run by corporate overlords, who don't want wealth to be distributed evenly, because they wouldn't be overlords if it was. Add in the "American Dream", a belief that anyone can become a corporate overlord (which they can, but it's very unlikely), and the middle class will oppo
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
no (Score:5, Funny)
Re:no (Score:2, Funny)
Re:no (Score:2)
You can run X under Cygwin in rootless mode so that it will blend in with your Windows environment and use your Windows fonts.
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
Or.. (Score:5, Funny)
If you can't beat them... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If you can't beat them... (Score:3, Informative)
yes but.... (Score:2, Funny)
Smart Move (Score:2)
I noticed (yes I RTFA) that they are also going to license their virtual disk format royalty free.
They have a bit of a hard road to climb it they want to compete with VMWare, but Microsoft certainly has the muscle to do so.
This isn't really new (Score:2)
The product referred to in the article is the formerly Connectix VirtualPC, originally a Mac product for running Windows under the MacOS. Then Connectix added support for Linux, so the ability to run Linux inside a VirtualPC isn't really new, and Microsoft didn't have to write any code to do this. Of course, I don't understand what all the fuss is about when a Free and Open Source product called QEMU [bellard.free.fr] does pretty much everything VirtualPC does and it actually runs under Linux (and others), as well as suppor
Re:This isn't really new (Score:2)
Having formal support means everything to most organizations.
Departmentalisation... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is no different than when Microsoft released an Office for Mac. Naturally the Windows platform teams and managers didn't much care for that but Office saw it as an opportunity. The people doing the name calling are the ones within Microsoft that are competing against Linux not the ones that couldn't care less either way or want to port their projects to Linux to improve their customer base.
In my opinion, when we see a dominant Linux platform (e.g. desktop environment, tool set etc) then we will also see a copy of Microsoft Office released. Microsoft will follow the market with most of its products.
Re:Departmentalisation... (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise known as "cost centre accou
Virtual Server ain't done... (Score:5, Funny)
Hell Freezes over (Score:5, Funny)
Originally submitted without MS bashing as:
Hell Freezes Over-Thursday April 21, @08:37AM -Rejected
LMAO (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder who will be the first one to run:
- Linux Running VMware running...
- Windows Running VirtualServer2005 running...
- Linux Running WMware running...
You get the idea..Re:LMAO (Score:5, Funny)
Can you cluster the external Linux box with the internal one?
Re:LMAO (Score:5, Funny)
NOT ENOUGH LEVELS! (Score:3, Funny)
Some time ago..... (Score:2)
And of course, there is Wine [winehq.com] which allows Windows application to run on Linux.
So Microsoft are going to have to compete somehow.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Complete backfire up ahead (Score:2)
this is GREAT! (Score:2)
I don't see this functionality as likely to be used anywhere but the desktop (e.g. developers/etc. who want more than cygwin offers), which afaik isn't remotely their target for this?
It already runs Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
All they are doing here is adding it as a supported functionality. Not that that doesn't count for something.
Now if we could just boot Windows virtual machine from a Linux host with near native performence, then you'd really haev a break through.
This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I have a problem with Windows, but it makes a really *bad* web server.
VMware is FAR superior (Score:3, Informative)
VMware doesn't care what you run as a guest OS. I can basically write my own OS and it will boot. It emulates the virtual machine from the bare metal up, starting with a POST.
Re:This is cool (Score:3, Informative)
It will almost work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It will almost work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It will almost work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It will almost work (Score:3, Insightful)
Cue Agent Smith (Score:5, Funny)
Who would use this? (Score:2)
Also its probably too good an opportunity for Microsoft not to miss to engineer their virtualisation software to make Linux appear to perform worse/less stably than Windows.
"promised to add Linux support" (Score:2, Insightful)
Nevertheless, MS has cleverly played the...
With MS you can run LInux but with LInux you can't run MS card...
How to read this from a business POV?
Sabotage (Score:5, Insightful)
Etymology: French, from saboter to clatter with sabots, botch, sabotage, from sabot
This affair reminds me of the DR-DOS and Windows 3.1. All M$ has to do is to "support it" and quietly make sure what "support" they provide is broken in some strange way, and place the blame on Linux to [I]sabotage[/I] its adaptation. This way at a later date they can make the claim "users have made their choice. Linux is out."
Re:Sabotage (Score:4, Interesting)
I love VMware. However, I think they've gotten a little on on their horse these days (ditching the $100 hobby license), so I'm looking forward to them getting made irrelevant by upcoming open source options. plex86 (bochs spin-off) seems to have died of ennui, but Xen, user mode linux, and QEMU (going into the kernel, no?) are gonna overtake VMware fast.
In fact, VMware reminds me of AcceleratedX 5 years ago. They got cocky, charged too much, then became irrelevant by the next major rev of X11 servers.
Not new... (Score:4, Interesting)
wtf? (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't have a choice (Score:3, Interesting)
So now I can... (Score:5, Funny)
So instead of one cross-platform standards-based language embodying write-one-run-anywhere, we do it the long way around.
Yeah, this is a really great idea. "Our new PCs from Dell can run six different operating systems inside each other right out of the box. We call it the Mental Whiplash System."
Here's a Horror. MS Linux merger... (Score:3, Funny)
2) M$ gets a solid OS base.
3) Linux gets a decent desktop. (Okay its no Mac but still.)
4) $$$
Very late to the party (Score:5, Funny)
[ducks]
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the age of the quote I see no reason why a company can't provide support in their product for a product they dislike or compete against. Hell, you've been able to import non-Microsoft file formats into their applications for years.
Especially if it's going to mean that they're actually going to have a more competitive product or bring them more money.
Yes, but.... (Score:3, Funny)
Killing cross-platform development (Score:3, Insightful)
MS Press release, 2007:
"New distribution format makes the OS irrelevant"
"they are also going to license their virtual disk format royalty free"
Now, if MS at some point included VPC on every desktop OS -don't laugh, it could happen, say five years from now- think of the possibilities.
An "application" could be comprised of a very minimalist custom OS + only the specific functionality for the application needed. With a virtualized PC, you've got a completely standardized hardware platform, although one that is hardly performance oriented. For instance, the older VirtualPC used what, a virtualized 2-d video chipset without much "hardware" acceleration. You could package up an entire single-application Linux system in a very optimized disk file. The O/S need never be seen by the user.
The next step will be customized vitual hardware+driver modules for VPC plugin, consisting of vitualized higher performance video chipsets, RAID, etc. Instead of "DLL" hell, ten years from now we'll have some sort of virtual hardware hell as the single simple standardized vitural hardware platform expands...
Just think! Running Linux on Windows Server (Score:5, Funny)
Cool!
Um, what was the question?
Alternatively (Score:3, Funny)
Embrace and Extend (Score:3, Insightful)
Geez. How soon we forget. An entire page of commentary and no one has mentioned it yet, but that is the Microsoft strategy.
Furthermore, there is no reason at all to believe that just because M$ says they bought VPC to compete with VMware that it is true. In fact, given Micro$history there's every reason not to believe it.
Anybody got a pool on when we see the first Linux patch from M$ - the one that will let Linux run on VPC? Remember Java - they didn't "break it", they just "extended" it.
And as for NT 4.0 support ... Phfft. They don't have any interest in supporting those kinds of antiques unless they're getting more $$ for it than they do for hacking together another OS-upgrade-support kludge.
I predict VPC support from M$ will be very short-lived; it's a near term wedge they can use to deceive a small fraction of a small market into spending some money with M$, yes, but the real goal has to be exactly what the kind of stunt they pulled with Java. Copy it until they can't get away with it - create proprietary extensions, then produce a clone with a different naming scheme, sanitized binaries, and no traceable legal relation to the original product. Once they have that VPC will disapear, support will dry up, and anyone gullible enough to have bought it will be told to "upgrade".
I'll say it again, Bill: the only thing you can do that stands a chance of keeping Microsoft in the software game long term is to release a Linux distro. Of course, you'll probably have to hire some developers, but from what I hear you won't have to pay US wages... Good Luck, and God Bless.
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems that it would be the other way....if you 'needed' windows for something...you'd fire it up on top of Linux (or other Unix type OS)....
Re:they turned back! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they turned back! (Score:2, Funny)
That's going to skew the uptime reliability for Linux servers.
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Interesting)
The trick is, with server Virtualization (IMHO) never run production stuff. They're great, really great for test labs because you can snapshot and undo and you have other neat features. But they're horrible for actual real world work. If I was looking for a smaller form factor from my services in a production environment, for real, I'd go with a blade server chassis.
Ironically though
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Insightful)
It was right about the time that MS Visual Basic came around that every shoe salesman turned manager started coming up with screen shots of "applications" they've written and that we should be able to put a product together in a few weeks based on that... It wasn't THAT bad but it did happen a couple of times and that was a couple of times too often.
The 80's were a good time to be in tech. IMO.
LoB
Re:they turned back! (Score:2)
In this case, the sales argument to pointy haired bosses will be "did evil admins set up Linux infrasctucture on your network without you knowing? No problem. We can move that back to a supported platform. Microsoft. Where do you want to go to
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've installed VMWare (workstation) on my pc at home. I booted a virtual linux pc, created a ramdisk image i needed, booted another linux pc and i used that image. All without rebooting the 'host' computer.
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:they turned back! (Score:3, Informative)
Depending on your OEM. FWIW, the Campus Software Coercion version I got from the bookstore (only $50/semester + $5 at purchase!) installed just fine under vmware. And then I toasted it in favor of 98 for space reasons (stupid little laptop hard drive).
Additionally, you can install XP on a partition or drive, and then access that drive directly via vmware (i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:2)
Nice. Much better than Ipsum Lorem.
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:2, Informative)
With more powerful server hardware, even in the "WinTel" arena, it's possible to coalesce a number of previously disparate servers onto one box, reducing the total cost of ownership. This is especially true for fragile we-have-no-clue-how-to-migrate-it legacy apps running on old hardware and software - there are migration tools that will virtualize the server, exactly as it is, so it's running as a process on a spanky new box.
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:2)
"We'll support non-Windows virtual machines running on our Virtual Server, including Linux. Virtualization am much good. Make much money sense to Bizarro."
Re:Virtually Meaningless (Score:3, Informative)
Nice try at boosting your Google Rank. I'm not buying it.
Good! (Score:3, Funny)
As it should be. Only Marketing Weasels(tm) understand one another's mumblings. It lets them say things without really saying anything. The fact that this unintelligable banter is confusing to you means you're still a geek.
(Oh, and just for the record, that phrase translates into "Damn Linux! Won't it just go away?")
Virtualization rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
For us the idea is we have a half-dozen 1U boxes that are getting old and need to run basically stand-alone environments; they don't play well with other software environments. Budgetarily replacing the 1U boxes with new 1U boxes that meet the hardware standards is ridiculously expensive _and_ a complete waste of disk, CPU and I/O capacity, not to mention power, heat, etc. The current boxes (dual P3 700s) sit at near-idle all the time and don't have much, if any, local storage or I/O demands.
As it stands right now, we have 4 virtual systems (1 freebsd, 3 win2k) running on a dual P4/3.2 xeon server using 1-10 percent of CPU capacity. We have about 6 more systems we'll migrate over to this environment and I seriously doubt we'll get beyond 20% CPU utilization. Plus we can easily clone some a template server and have a test or eval box going in about 5 minutes. You can also snapshot a virtual disk so that you can rollback to the checkpoint point (great for upgrades or testing), or just clone the entire virtual disk.
It works best with systems that have low I/O and CPU demands or bursty demands; I wouldn't do it with systems that have high I/O or CPU demands. You can dedicate physical LUNs to VMs, but it kills some of the flexibility in exchange for performance.
For the wags who criticize me for not running it on Linux or using their high-buck ESX product: We looked at ESX, and management of the ESX system we thought was excessively convoluted and the performance for our needs not meaningfully different. We have no problems with stability on 2003, either, plus we're a FreeBSD shop, not a Linux shop, and we didn't want to BS around trying to run GSX under FreeBSD, as it wasn't a supported host OS.
I figure this is way more the future (since it is the past on OS/390) of computing than blades, especially once its merged with SAN virtualization. Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization. I also think that eventually MS will merge virtualization completely into the OS, and will license you on total CPUs and total concurrent images.
Re:This is getting old .... (Score:2)
Re:This is getting old .... (Score:3, Interesting)
The difference is that Linux is not just another competitor like Apple, Sun, Adobe, whatever. Linux is not another company, it represents and entirely new (re-hashed?) philosophy surrounding computer technology. As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). Then corporate America swoops in, like always, and takes these concepts to market. And life is good? Sure, why n
Corporate America is at least as responsible (Score:3, Insightful)
"As I see it, the transistor was invented in academia, the internet in government labs and academia; both free-and-open-information-sharing friendly (well not always with the government). "
Then you need to check your eyes. The transitor was invented by Bell Labs, part of the AT&T monopoly. Unix was also invented there.
Ethernet, the core technology behind the internet was invented by Xerox (funded by very valuable patents) and made a standard by X
Re:Hmm...this starts to remind me of something... (Score:3, Funny)
Same time... (Score:2)
It would be nice to run both at the same time. Question is which one do you want to be the guest, and how much overhead do you pay to run one under the virtual server. Maybe it makes sense, for some people, to run the bloated Windows natively... and run the leaner Linux on the virtual machine.
Question
Unlikely, IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
b) Because of a) above, if MS do anything in the open source UNIX space, it'll more likely be with FreeBSD...simply because that will still allow them to make the rules.
On the other hand, an interesting route that they could possibly go would be to get involved purely in Xorg development. That way the underlying OS is provided by Linux/*BSD, (the area that M