Microsoft Updates Server Virtualization Roadmap

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft officials last week announced changes to its Virtual Server roadmap, including making the upcoming Service Pack 1 release, which would have been free to all existing customers, an R2 release, which will require everybody but Software Assurance customers to buy a new license. Officials, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, also confirmed the company is aiming to support the new virtualization features that Intel and AMD are building into their X64 chips with the hypervisor it is building for a post-Longhorn update for Windows.

Microsoft threw its hat into the server virtualization market last September, when it started shipping Virtual Server 2005, the first Microsoft product to let users to carve multi-processor X86 servers into smaller virtual machines, each of which can run its own instance of an X86-compatible operating system. Server consolidation, re-hosting of legacy Windows NT and Windows 2000 applications under a Windows Server 2003 host, disaster recovery, and streamlining of software testing and deployment were some of the benefits Microsoft touted when Virtual Server 2005 launched (see "Virtual Server 2005 Takes Flight").

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled the first beta release of Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was to be the first major update to Virtual Server 2005. SP1 was to include a bevy of new features and enhancements, not to mention the obligatory fixes to the bugs that inevitably crop up, especially in the first release of a new product. (Okay, so Virtual Server 2005 was largely based on the virtualization technology it acquired from Connectix in 2003, but there were some key differences, particularly when it came to support for Linux virtual machines, which Microsoft apparently removed from the product.)

While Microsoft from the beginning had said that Virtual Server 2005 would support all the "major X86 operating systems," Linux support was not in the cards for the first release. Support for running Linux virtual machines under Virtual Server 2005 was to be one of the big new features delivered with SP1. Some of the other new features were support for X64 processors from Intel and AMD, better support for hyper threading to boost performance, support for clustering across hosts for better high availability, and support for network installations of guest operating systems.

Apparently, all these new features added up to more than a SP1 release for Microsoft. At IDF last week, Microsoft officials announced they are changing the name of the new release to Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 (R2). Besides the new name, there is nothing different between the SP1 and R2 releases, except for who is eligible to get it: If users did not purchase the Software Assurance maintenance package, they will have to buy a new license if they want R2. A license for the standard edition of Virtual Server 2005, which supports machines with up to four processors, cost $499, while the enterprise edition, which supports machines with up to 32 processors, cost $999. The ship date for Virtual Server 2005 R2 (like the SP1 release before it), is still on track for the end of 2005.

Officials also disclosed plans to ship an additional new release of Virtual Server 2005 in the late-2006 timeframe. This post-R2 release, which is slated for beta testing in the first half of 2006, would support the new hardware virtualization technologies that AMD and Intel are building into future versions of their X64 chips.

Intel's forthcoming Virtualization Technology (VT), which was code-named "Vanderpool," and AMD's virtualization strategy, which still goes by its code-name, "Pacifica," will push down into the hardware a lot of the virtualization work that is currently being done by software products like Virtual Server 2005 and the third-party providers, such as EMC's VMware subsidiary, and the open-source XenSource virtualization project. Chips supporting the new VT and Pacifica architectures are expected to start shipping in 2006, about when Microsoft is planning its post-R2 release of Virtual Server 2005.

It is often better for customers when features that had been accomplished above the operating system level are pushed down into the hardware, and this is expected to be the case with VT and Pacifica. However, it does beg the question: What will become of the virtualization software vendors? Indeed, Microsoft is currently working on building additional virtualization capabilities, including a "hypervisor" layer, directly into Windows. This hypervisor layer would provide an interface to the VT and Pacifica capabilities running in the hardware, and could obviate the need for a product like Virtual Server 2005.

Microsoft was planning to include some of these new virtualization capabilities into Windows Server Longhorn, which we don't expect until 2007 (see "Microsoft Working on New Virtualization Technologies for Longhorn"). However, we hear that Microsoft has not fully committed at this point to delivering that functionality with Longhorn, and could choose to deliver that functionality as an update to Longhorn (but most likely not as a service pack). That is probably a good move, considering the rapid pace of innovation in virtualization technology occurring today, and the time we must wait for Longhorn. A lot can change between now and then, and in this case it benefits Microsoft to remain flexible.