Microsoft Providing Virtual Server Free

liliafan writes "In an effort to gain a market majority over VMware Microsoft announced it is giving Virtual Server away for free, additionally they will provide customer support for Linux. In a related move VMware have opened their partition file format to the community, aggressive and suprising moves in the virtualisation market."

VMWare == good

[tcopeland]

We use it for testing indi [getindi.com] on a variety of platforms - we've got preconfigured WinME/XP/2K VMs that we can fiddle with. It's great for isolating bugs like "when indi is installed on a Win2K box where Outlook has not been configured, blah happens". Nifty stuff!

VMware

[Sduic]

This will enable use by all developers, software vendors and projects and includes open licensing compatible with those operating under open source licenses such as the GPL.

Just how compatible must the license be be (I imagine a BSD type is pushing it)? Also, do they mean GPL 2 or 3?

Re:This Move doesn't make any sense to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Microsoft hopes that poeple will host their virtual servers on Microsoft Windows platforms, even if the guest operating systems run Linux.

Stifling Innovation?

[Enrique1218]

Is this yet another expample of Microsoft stifling innovation. Some had already mention the parallels to Netscape where Microsoft essentially knock them out of business witht the free release of IE. Then, let IE development stagger till it became riddle with holes and bugs. I worry that they are doing the same thing in virtualization.

Fighting the last war

[jmorris42]

Microsoft sees VMWare as their enemy because they are banking cash today. (Thou shalt have no other vendors other than Microsoft) However Xen is probably the bigger threat. And I'd say they understand that as well, otherwise they could have done the one thing that would have made an instant difference.

Remember that when Xen was a research project at a university they had XP running in Xen because they had a source license for XP. However since said license didn't allow actually releasing anything derived from knowledge gained from that source they couldn't release the XP client drivers. Had Microsoft removed that restriction or, even better, provided Microsoft supported drivers Xen would likely crush VMWare in a few short years.

Great news! Question...

[geekylinuxkid]

I wonder now that it's OSS, now it can be thrown into the kernel and possibly be mounted like any other fs? Is this possible? Thanks.

VPC != MS Virtual Server?

[sh4na]

Using this sort of software, you actually NEED Windows. You boot up a VM and then proceed to install an OS just like a real machine. This is massively unlike Wine and is somewhat different from VPC too.

Where is VirtualPC different in this? Virtual Server *is* VPC, MS bought Connectix and changed the name of the product... VPC is an virtualization environment where you install windows (and other OSs), so you need windows to install it, I don't see the difference.

If you say Microsoft's Virtual Server is considerably worse than VPC was, then I can agree there's a difference, and this is not just MS bashing. I've tried both, and know windows admins that have tried both, and we all rue the day that Connectix got bought, because VPC was (and still is, amazingly enough) a much better application than Virtual Server, in speed, stability and compatibility.

It's ironic that MS is basically killing a good product much in the way that IBM did when they bought Lotus. There are things that just shouldn't be bought by big companies, they have too many conflicting interests and not enough vision and purpose to carry out a truly good thing.

Re:wow, more echoes from the past

[jthill]

They didn't start this [vmware.com]. VMware have $0.00'd a midrange VM server. Works real nice.

It's the "supporting Linux" part that gives me the giggles. Believe anything out of a Microsoft mouth on the subject of Linux? The giggles are getting uncontrollable.

They may not be in trouble, but they're definitely having to do things they'd very much rather not do.

risky, risky, risky.....

[ecalkin]

a lot of the ms strategy involves people not being exposed to linux and being able to make a comparison. i would beleive that the last thing microsoft really wants is for someone running xp pro to fire up a free version of vpc and running linux to see what is looks like and how it works.
    so i don't understand.

eric

Re:Let's Not Forget The Mac Community...

[sh4na]

Let's not forget that the battle here is for control of the enterprise use of windows. Before the wave of virtualization software, if you were a sysadmin on a company, you used whatever OS was handed down to you from up above, mostly, of course, windows.

Multinationals institute a standard OS that sysadmins are stuck with, and you just can't justify changing OS's on anything unless it's critical for your business that you do it, and that's a tough sale indeed if any MS representative can go to the boss and say that what you want to do can be done in windows (note I'm not saying that it's done as well as with other OS's, just that it *can* be done, MS has enough software to cover all bases).

So now with virtualization software you don't have to dump the OS... you just run another one inside it, so the sysadmin doesn't have to justify big expenses and has the advantage of showing that another OS can work better on any given task. So suddenly the field is open again, one can sidetrack the *official* platform and increase productivity (= $$$).

And you know what, the boss listens when a sysadmin says "we don't have to spend that much more $$$, and we can improve our efficiency on this and this if we just run a linux on this box and have it do X. It's still running windows so we're not breaking any official company rules here, our objectives (= $$$) will be met, and we can drop the annual MS fees"

So now MS has a conundrum on it's hands... suddenly the monopoly is endangered in the worst possible way; big companies escaping it's grasp (i.e. not buying the top dollar server apps it sells). So what does it do? Buys a virtualization software so it can launch it's own platform and try and prevent the admins from escaping. VirtualPC was very good at virtualizing non-windows systems, Virtual Server is not that good at it. VPC was very sleek, VS big and bulky, so that admins who try it out won't be too tempted to run lots of stuff on it.

In all of this, the Mac is really not the target. The battle front is not at the Mac, as far as VMWare and MS are concerned. The virtualization market might be the biggest battle for control of the admin that we've seen ever, and might just be the one that finally breaks MS, especially because it comes at a time when MS is being dragged down by it's own sheer weight, and it's not the agile, fast-to-the-market company it once was.

One can only hope... :p

Same old Microsoft...

[FridayBob]

Giving away products for free in order to kill off another ISV that they decide to compete with. Of course, VMware has only itself to blame: this is what you get when you grow your market share enough to attract Microsoft's attention.

But seriously, in a normal market with healthy competition among OS makers, Microsoft would leave VMware alone and be happy that they're doing so well, selling products that work with Windows. However, this is not a normal market and Microsoft is a monopolist by any definition but their own. Therefore, VMware must die. Ho-hum.

Let's hope that nice lawyer lady from Iowa that Cringely was talking about last week [pbs.org] drags them into court again soon.

Virtualization is the next commodity technology

[bec1948]

I've been studying these technologies for a while now. It's only recently that processor power has reached the point that an x86 powered computer had the processor performance to overcome the inherent design limitation historically imposed by design decisions made by IBM and subsequently Microsoft and Intel that can make use of all the power available in the processors themselves. For a multitude of reasons (off topic) this power is irrelevant to most home users and business users of pcs. More importantly this power is irrelevant to the majority of server purposes. It's well known that most servers used in business are running at much less than 20% utilization levels. And that's with old boxes. This means that buying a new server with current technology results in a box running at levels as low as 5 or 10% utilization. Why bother? Enter virtualization. With virtualization a single box can replace 4, 7 16, 20 or more servers. Not that good for IntelDellIBMHP etc, but great for you and me. Less electricity needed, less cables, less everything. The only factor holding this back is licensing costs. If you can reduce those costs too, wow. Microsoft allows a single $4K Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition license to support up to four instances. If you don't have to pay extra for virtualization software, then the price starts to be very competitive with supported Linux licensing. More importantly it makes virtualization a standard way of doing things. The real question is what happens to the open source community when the development of free tools like Xen loose their support fee value when competing with a more mature platform that costs the same thing. We're not there yet, but it will happen. In a year or three.

This is a good move for the consumer (hopefully)

[fronell]

Virtualization is the future and helps us get to that goal of utility computing. Its not too surprising that Microsoft has done this, nor was this the first drop in price for their server virtualization product.

What is surprising is Microsoft lagging behind VMWare big time when it comes to server virtualization. When I spoke to a VMWare sales rep, he said the money comes from ESX (which costs $3750 a pop), not GSX or the workstation products. People buy ESX because they want the following (I know this because the company I work for evaluated the different VM products):

-Faster VM performance
-Support (anyone that works in a datacenter will tell you that support is always necessary)
-Features (virtual center, virtual SMP, vmotion)

No other product stands up to ESX when it comes to the datacenter environment, and thats the market Microsoft needs to go after. The midrange virtualization products like GSX or virtual server are used for developer testing or in QA, but not for running production services (at least not in the big environments). This move by Microsoft won't make much of a dent in VMWare's share (at least where the money is) so its not a huge step.

I love ESX, and one thing that I hope will make ESX better is Microsoft putting pressure on VMWare to not get too comfy and to constantly innovate because the company's future depends on it. I just hope it doesn't have the same outcome as IE vs NS.

Okay, great, but....

[Hosehead17]

First off, this is a good thing. As someone else said most new servers are running around 5-10% utilization. In fact we have a server at work dedicated to running virtual servers that is running 7 under MS Virtual Server 2003 R2 64-Bit, and it hums along at about 15%. Our only limiting factor is RAM and hard drive space, but more so the RAM. Most new services we are looking at implementing we mock up in a virtual server before even considering putting it on a host machine. If we like the way it runs in the virtual server we often decide to just leave it in a virtual server, extra RAM for our virtual server box is cheaper than a whole new box.

Now for the downside. As nice as this is, I see this as a ploy for MS to sell more copies of Windows, even with them releasing the Linux tools. If I was in their shoes, sure give Virtual Server away, the ones losing are the hardware vendors.

Re:Why on earth...

[Jesus_666]

I know someone who does this. He's mainly a Win user, but occasionally needs *nix apps. For him Linux-in-a-box is a better choice than multiboot since he can just pop the VM open, do his work and close it without leaving his default environment (after all, he does do his regular stuff like mail under Windows). He doesn't try to be a power user and he has not had many unexplicable system failures, so he's quite happy with Windows.

Although this is only until I can talk him into a Mac, of course. ;)

Re:Virtual Server is better than VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

You tested one application for one month and you then determined that across the board, "Virtual Center is better". Could you include some more details...

Were you using a SAN or some type of shared storage? How smooth was the moving of a running virtual machine from one host to another? How configurable or easy was configuring the automatic load balacing across multiple hosts? Were you only monitoring CPU or were you looking at many parameters across all of the virtual machines and hosts? Did you adjust the "shares" for the CPU and/or dedicate CPU's to different virtual hosts at all? What was the effect of using hyperthreading if so equiped (effectively using 2 CPU's but must wait for both to become availalbe if enabled). What were your bottlenecks. How many virtual machines were running on your host?

Re:wow, more echoes from the past

[Skjellifetti]

Its been awhile since I've had an antitrust course, but I believe that a monopolist is not allowed to use their monopoly profits to cross subsidize another non-monopoly product (e.g. sell the non-monopoly product for less than its production cost). This is a form of predatory pricing designed to put rivals out of business. A monopolist is also forbiden from bundling the monopoly and non-monopoly products together for similar reasons.

Re:And don't forget AMD/Intel

[PCM2]

Who is winning that race? From what I've heard, the VMWare management tools are far superior.

VMware is way out ahead. Their ESX Server product is worth paying for if you buy into their idea of "virtual infrastructure," which is basically doing the kind of stuff that mainframe users were doing years ago, only with commodity hardware. You can move virtual machines back and forth from different hardware resources, do automatic failover, all kinds of stuff. What the basic Server product can do is nothing when you consider what the full-blown product can do. In that sense, VMware has been very clever in releasing free products like VMware Player, and now Server, in that it helps everybody get their heads around the idea of virtual machines for day to day computing.

That said, there is no shortage of competitors, as far as companies that are trying to come up with tools. XenSource and Virtual Iron are two I can think of off the top of my head. Right now neither is positioning itself directly, head-to-head against ESX Server, because they know that's a hard road to climb. But eventually they'll have to. I have no doubt that Red Hat, and Novell especially, will be getting in on that action soon, too, given their support for Xen.

The next couple of years are going to be pretty interesting for the virtualization market.

Re:This is a good move for the consumer (hopefully

[fronell]

ESX is an OS customized for virtualization. Its actually Linux but with a modified kernel used to run their hypervisor (the hypervisor is what gives ESX the performance boost) and vmfs file system. Having both GSX and ESX in our environment, I can tell you that no one in the IT department wants to use GSX because the ESX servers are much more responsive. Since ESX is much more effecient with the hardware, it allows you to load more VMs on a physical server thus a greater return on that physical server purchase.

Another nice thing is since ESX is the app and the OS, the support contract will cover both. With GSX, you would have to get a support contract for GSX and the host operating system (which would be Windows Server or Linux).

Re:Virtual Server is better than VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*. I don't know why I do this...

a) Virtual Server is 64 on a 64 bit OS, if you want it, but VMWare was only available in 32 bit.
64-bit OSes run 32-bit code just fine (well, except linux distros that screw up the 32-bit compatability layer ... but windows runs 32-bit code fine). The real test is running 64-bit guest OSes - who can give the application the advantage of 64 bits? Because it's the application that matters, not the OS.

b) Virtual Server, running the application as VMWare, actually ran those apps 10% faster than did VMWare. Our application pegs the CPU for several hours, and so we felt that this was as good as test as any.
And if you're trying to virtualize CPU-bound apps, you deserve to lose the money. Everyone in the server market knows that it's throughput, not speed, that is king. What market are you in?

c) Virtual Server was easier to set up and use.
MS Virtual Server is feature-comparable to VMware Server, which you didn't try. Feature-wise, you've just told me MS XP Home is easier to set up than MS Advanced Server 2003. Duh.

d) For the price difference, you could get another few datablades.
I'm a VMware employee, and I encourage anyone to try both.

Re:wow, more echoes from the past

[ChipX86]

As one of the developers of VMware Server, I can tell you that it *will* be free when out of beta. This is a free product. We're only making money off of optional support contracts.

I doubt that legit VMware reps would have made a claim otherwise, but if so, they either misspoke or were given incorrect information.

Virtual Servers and Vista

[theonetruekeebler]

This may be the smartest thing Microsoft has ever done: Not because of what it means to current products, but because of what it means to future MS operating systems.

The biggest reason for all the bugs, compatibility issues, and bloat in Microsoft's operating systems is backwards compatibility. And I have to admit that they've done a commendable job, given the tens of thousands of Windows applications out there, each with multiple versions. Not a perfect job, but I have a few ten-year-old applications running, unrecompiled, on my XP box at home.

Microsoft wants Vista to be excellent, and to break new ground, but they are hobbled by binary compatibility issues with versions of Windows dating back to the 80386 -- and the 8086 in some cases. Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility. And with Virtual Server, they can do just that.

Imagine: Your company lives or dies by an application written by a long-gone vendor, that runs great under NT 3.1 but crashes everything written since. No problem! Boot up NT under a virtual server and run it there. Got a proprietary database that only runs on Solaris x86? Same answer. Your kid's favorite game originally written for Windows 95? Hell, a computer built in 2007 won't even notice Win95's footprint.

In fact, it probably makes sense for Microsoft to ship Vista with new versions of XP, NT, 95, Win3.1, DOS 5.0, and whatever else floats their boat, each recompiled with exactly one device driver for video, keyboard, mouse, disk, CD and network.

So everybody's legacy system problems are solved by Virtual Server. Meanwhile, Vista itself provides a fast, stable, flexible platform for new applications to be built on, and Microsoft has a maintainable operating system, completely unencumbered by their past mistakes, that they can improve on for years to come.