Virtualization Goes Mainstream

InformationWeek is reporting that, during the same week that Microsoft announced the free price for Virtual PC, VMWare 1.0 was released for free as well. Though there were already many free options for virtualization available, these major products signal a shift in the industry. From the article: "There are many ramifications here. Obviously, the slew of products means network managers can now adopt virtual servers into their overall strategies and don't have acquisition costs providing a justification to avoid it. Other than the very-high-end VMware ESX and the midline Microsoft Virtual Server on mainstream XP platforms, virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it."

Re:right...

[eipgam]

As if most Windows users are any different.

Re:For the uninitiated...

[Tx]

The difference is somewhat semantic. Many people take emulation to mean "machine emulation" like Bochs for example, where you are emulating the entire hardware of the machine, and performance therefore sucks. What's commonly termed as virtualization emulates some items of hardware, but code is running natively on the CPU.

In reality, the terms emulation are somewhat interchangeable - you can say "full virtualization", which means the entire machine hardware is virtualized (what is commonly called emulation), and you could say "partial emulation" when referring to what is commonly referred to as virtualization. Indeed, you might even call the likes of WINE "API emulation", though that might be stretching it somewhat.

I hope ESX is a cash cow

[93 Escort Wagon]

Microsoft can, of course, afford to play this "free" game until the cows come home. I hope VMware can survive this. While sysadmins (okay, maybe not MSCE "sysadmins") will likely continue to choose the VMware solution, in the end we all know deployment is often affected by drive-by management decisions.

Re:right...

[macintyred]

Looks like I put my foot in my mouth. I was wrong. Sorry.

Re:It's free... At least now.

[NormalVisual]

Xen smokes both VMWARE and Virtual PC in terms of performance.

This often is true, but it really depends on what you need to do. Unless you're running Xen on a CPU that has VT support on-chip, you're not running any VMs at all unless the guest OS has a kernel specifically modified to run with it.

I use Xen at home to run five Debian servers on a single box (and had to recompile the kernels for the domU and dom0 VMs). It runs wonderfully, and hasn't given me a moment's trouble. However, I'd never be able to run a Windows guest on it, even if I wanted to. For everyday use, I have a Windows box that has several Linux VMs running under VMware Workstation (saves me *tons* of time for the kind of development work I do), and I've had no problems at all with performance. Just for giggles I tried BeOS 5 under VMware, and the BeOS OpenGL teapot demo still can manage 40 frames/second.

I don't think there's any one VM solution that you could say is "the best" - your needs are going to determine which is best for you.

Re:right...

[MindStalker]

The speculation on what may be the licensing terms of one edition of the future software is nice and fine, but it is just speculation.
Not really microsoft offers the same 4 license for Windows Server 2003 R2 which exist NOW. Essentially MS is offering 4 virtual license with all future operating systems in their Enterprise versions.