Microsoft Updates Server Virtualization Software

Published: June 13, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft this week made available an update to Virtual Server 2005, its premiere virtualization software for servers in lieu of the hypervisor product that's still in development. The software giant has added several new features to Virtual Server 2003 Release 2 Service Pack 1, including support for hardware-based virtualization technology, new backup and recovery features, better clustering, and support for the latest releases of the Solaris and SuSE Linux operating systems.

Microsoft has had a rough go of it lately in the virtualization space. The company is being trounced by competitor VMware in the current market for products that can subdivide a server into a series of independent virtual machines. VMware Server from VMware, dominates the current market. In April 2006, Microsoft basically admitted as much when it announced it would stop charging for Virtual Server 2005 R2 and make it a free download, despite having changed the product from a free SP1 release to a for-fee R2 release less than a year prior so it could charge money for it. XenSource and Virtual Iron have also brought increased competition to the virtualization software market.

No worries, though: Microsoft would catch up and pass the market with its new hypervisor product, codename "Viridian," which it claimed would do things no other hypervisor product could do, such as virtualize a 64-core machine, which is four times as many cores as any competitor can do. But that plan has run into trouble, too, as the company announced last month that it would dramatically scale back Viridian's features so it could make its ship date, basically admitting that building a hypervisor is not as easy as it may sound and that it has some learning (or acquiring) to do.

That brings us to Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, which is finally available as a free download from Microsoft's Web site. Microsoft had originally planned to ship R2 SP1 by the end of December, but delayed it last year following the business release of Windows Vista. The final product Microsoft released to manufacturing doesn't appear to introduce any features that weren't already included in the last beta, which was released nine months ago--support for Windows Vista business editions being the lone exception.

Despite the delays, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 brings some useful virtualization features, including support for the hardware-based virtualization technology that Intel and AMD have been baking into their processors for the last year or so: Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V).

Downtime due to backups should be reduced thanks to support for Volume Shadow Services (VSS) in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. With this feature, users can take "snapshots" of their physical machines that, in turn, take snapshots of their virtual machines, thereby eliminating the need to install agents in the virtual machine to perform a backup. Support for host clustering in this release should also help reduce downtime for users of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise or Datacenter editions, according to Microsoft.

This release also brings support for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 10 and Sun Microsystems' Solaris version 10 as guest operating systems. A total of 11 non-Windows operating systems are supported on Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, according to Microsoft.

This release brings a number of other features, including: the capability to mount a virtual hard disk (VHD) file as a virtual disk device on another operating system; increasing the default size for dynamically expanding VHDs from 16 GB to 127 GB, which Microsoft says will help in enterprise production, test, and disaster-recovery workloads; support for more than 64 virtual machines with the 64-bit Enterprise x64 Edition (a limit of 64 virtual machines is still in effect in the 32-bit Enterprise Edition); better support for Active Directory; and other bug fixes and security improvements.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition and Enterprise x64 Edition are available now. For more information and downloads visit www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver.

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