After his last foray into the “Linux guy reviews a Microsoft product” space, Jason Perlow is back — this time to take a look at Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization solution built into the newly released Windows Server 2008. Although Hyper-V is still in beta and isn’t slated to ship in final form until the latter half of this year — and will be missing a few previously-promised features by the time it does arrive — it just might be the “killer app” for Windows Server, and one which will have Microsoft’s competitors scrambling to keep up, Perlow claims.
Here he is, in his asbestos-lined underwear, awaiting the inevitable flames . Take it away, Jason:
I confess to being a virtualization junkie. I’ve been using VM technology on the x86 platform since 1999, when VMWare Workstation first came on the market with their first Linux release. Since then, I’ve worked with a number of virtualization products on the desktop and on the server, as well as in enterprise environments, particularly with VMWare’s ESX Server product, the current market leader in hypervisor-based paravirtualization solutions, as well as with Xen, the Open Source project that comprises the virtualization core of a number of Linux and Unix-based virtualization products and OSes, such as Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM, Sun xVM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Now I can add Microsoft’s Hyper-V (the beta version in the final Windows 2008 Server bits) to my list.
Hyper-V, formerly known as “Viridian”, greatly differs from the virtualization product from Microsoft currently marketed as Microsoft Virtual Server in that it uses a hypervisor to provide hardware abstraction services to the OS environment and do resource allocation and partitioning. This differs from products such as Microsoft Virtual Server, VMWare Server and VMWare Workstation, Parallels, Linux KVM, and the recently Sun-acquired Virtualbox from Innotek use a technique known as host-based virtualization in which a host operating system such as Windows or Linux runs a subprocess provided by its native kernel called a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) to provide virtualization services such as a virtual CPU, memory and devices to a virtual machine. A hypervisor, on the other hand, is a thin abstraction layer which boots on the native hardware that performs some of the functions of an OS kernel, but abstracts much of what is needed to run multiple operating systems with their applications on top of it.
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