Microsoft Adds to Virtualization

Microsoft has been busy piecing together in recent weeks new features and alliances intended to simplify virtualization in Windows, including broader interoperability, as well as validation of third-party apps in Windows Server environments.

The vendor has recently struck interoperability agreements with Novell, XenSource, and Sun. In mid-November, Microsoft also unveiled its Server Virtualization Validation Program, available next June, which will let third-party virtualization vendors validate their products with Windows Server operating systems.

This starts to address user complaints that Redmond's inability or unwillingness to support other apps complicates virtualization in a VMware-dominated market.

"Consistent with the rest of the software industry, Microsoft doesn't provide general product support for any third-party software," a company spokesman wrote in an email today.For customers with a "Premier" level support agreement, the vendor will use "commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues with Microsoft software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. This applies to all Microsoft server applications."

So if customers are willing to pay, they can get those Active Directory elements to run in a VMware ESX environment. Using Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server inside VMs is a big enterprise challenge mentioned at recent VMworld conferences, according to Harold Shapiro, formerly a senior IT executive at Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. of Burbank, Calif.

Three weeks ago Microsoft also finalized its plans for a hypervisor to be called Microsoft Hyper-V, which was once called Windows Server virtualization, or Viridian. The final version of Hyper-V will be available within 180 days after the release to manufacturing of Windows Server 2008, the spokesman said.

Shapiro also made the case earlier for Microsoft and other vendors to start supporting third-party apps on a standard OS within a virtual environment, and not on the OS itself. He argued that the generic driver set in ESX has all the software abstracted out, which makes it very stable, despite vendor claims to the contrary.

For simplicity's sake, Microsoft implemented the hypervisor in the style of a micro-kernel, pushing as much hypervisor functionality as possible into the virtualization stack, running within a partition.In contrast to VMware, where code that emulates legacy hardware runs in the hypervisor, the code for Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V resides within the virtualization stack, according to the Microsoft spokesman. Since customers are already familiar with the Microsoft driver model, this is supposed to allow them to leverage the hypervisor more readily.

Does all this mean we've turned a corner in the virtualization market and that innovation will foster a new wave of competition? Not necessarily, warns industry analyst Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "The data center guys will just wait and see what Microsoft delivers versus what they say they will deliver," he said. That may be a prudent tack where virtual claims are concerned.

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