Video: Longhorn - Windows Server Virtualization

Here’s a sneak peak at the new Windows Server Virtualization technology running under Windows Longhorn, which is due out later this year (hopefully).

The 6 minute video shows:

• Windows Server Virtualization running on Longhorn Server Core, managed from another Windows Server Longhorn box
• a combination of 64-bit guest virtual machines, 32-bit guest VMs and a Linux VM running on the same server core box
• An 8-core virtual machine
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which is new technology to manage all of the virtual machines running inside of the Windows Server Virtualization technology
• System Center Operations Manager, showing how it is able to remotely monitor the health of all the virtual machines and proactively fix the issues
• using a PowerShell script to hot-add a second network card into a live SQL virtual machine

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There’s a saying in the industry where Microsoft are known to “eat their own children”.

This means that they work closely with 3rd party vendors (their “children”), let the vendors build up a new technology, and once that’s done they will either buy them out or take on the technology themselves and directly compete against it.

This happened with the battle between Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape. Now IE has roughly an 85% market share, and Netscape is nowhere to be seen.

There are a few current battles going on:

• Microsoft vs. Citrix
• thin client communications (MS Terminal Server vs. Citrix Presentation Server)
• application streaming (MS SoftGrid vs. Citrix Presentation Server)
• SSL VPN (MS Intelligent Application Gateway vs. Citrix Access Gateway)
• Microsoft vs. VMware, for the server virtualization market (MS Virtual Server vs. VMware ESX)
• Microsoft vs. Mozilla, to try to keep dominance over the web browser market (MS Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox)
• Microsoft vs. Apple
  • portable music player (MS Zune vs. Apple iPod)
  • TV/movie software (MS Windows Media Center vs. Apple TV)
  • and even the operating system itself (MS Windows Vista vs. Apple OSX)

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Microsoft have been working hard the last few years on Windows Vista. On February 1st 2007 Microsoft finally released the various editions of Windows Vista to the general public. They didn’t get the mad midnight openings with hundreds of people just waiting to pounce when the retail store doors were opened. The Vista launch was far more mild.

The problem

Part of the reason for this is that there was a lot of mixed press regarding Windows Vista, since there were two big problems that Microsoft would have a hard time with: driver availability and compatibility of all of the common software applications which people use.
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