James Moody: Geek in Paradise

Continuing onwards, Microsoft today released the beta of Hyper-V, their virtualization solution to the masses. You can only get it in the x64 version of Server 2008 Enterprise, so if you managed to grab the wrong version, you’ll have to go back to the Server 2008 download page and download the x64 package that contains Hyper-V exclusively.

Looking forward to getting my hands on this personally.

Tags: Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V Virtualization

The Windows Server Blog gave us some updated news on Viridian today, and it wasn’t all roses. It seems that to make their Beta milestone, they are going to have to cut some of the features down to hit the mark.

Features to get the axe until a future release include:

1. Live Migration
2. Hot-add of resources (networking, processors, storage, memory)
3. Not really an “axe”, but core support will be limited to 16.

It seemed like Viridian was shaping up to be a VMWare killer just a short time ago, but this announcement really puts them behind the 8-ball again. These features were highly touted, and for them to be cut out, it would seem things aren’t going as smoothly as they had hoped.

I personally don’t have a huge need for virtualization, but I was looking forward to playing with the full Viridian features on release to Beta. The hot-add of resources would have been a blast to toy around with. It’s going to come across as a black eye to the Viridian Team to say the least. The loss of the 64-core limit initially touted will hurt them in the Enterprise/Datacenter space imho.

We can only hope they get these missing features in as a Service Pack update before RTM, or they’ll just be staring at VMWare’s taillights for awhile.

Microsoft’s Server Division posted an update to their blog today with the reasoning behind delaying Viridian and SP1 for Virtual Server 2005.

Also mentioned is the fact that Longhorn Server is still scheduled for a Beta 3 Relase sometime this half, on schedule, with RTM expected in the 2nd half.

Features on Viridian include the ability to scale up to 64 Processors, and provide hot adds of CPU’s, Memory, Disks and Networking with greater scaling capabilities. This level of product is far beyond what I would need working with the small business community but it’s great to see that Microsoft is leading the way in the Server field. 64 Processors, wow.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 will be available later this quarter and adds support for more non-Microsoft OS’s. Suse Enterprise Server 10 and Solaris 10 will be added, as well as support for Longhorn Server. Also mentioned was the fact they have seen ~15,00 downloads for Linux add-ins for VS 2005, noting a trend in companies consolidating hardware, freeing up space in the work area.

I haven’t had need of this level of software yet, but if my experiences with Virtual PC 2007 (1 million downloads in 38 days) during inhouse testing are indicative of the quality of these products, I foresee some very happy IT Departments in the near future.

There’s more to read, so go check it out!