The company’s CEO Steve Ballmer mooted plans for a hypervisor in April at the company’s Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. You’ll see us introduce hypervisor technology around Windows, that is important, he said. We have virtualization technology today, but really this notion of a smaller, thinner hypervisor and what that can mean is very important.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president of server and tools marketing and solutions, Andy Lees, told ComputerWire that the company is working with Intel and AMD on their respective VT and Pacifica processor-based virtualization technologies.
Virtualization today is used very much for develop and test, and much less in production, said Lees. Having a hypervisor semi-hardware layered virtualization is the important step forward. Ultimately we will build a hypervisor working with Intel and AMD and do it at the operating system level.
Microsoft already offers virtual machine technology with its Virtual Server 2005 product, which runs on top of Windows and supports Windows virtual machines, with Linux virtual machine support coming in the release of Service Pack 1 release later this year.
The hypervisor technology will be embedded within Windows and enable it to take direct advantage of processor-level virtualization technologies that will improve the performance and efficiency of running virtual machines.
This is particularly important if you have a trusted relationship between the hardware and the operating system level, said Lees. You get much better performance if those operations are done at the chip level.
The delivery of hypervisor technology will bring Microsoft into more direct competition with XenSource Inc, the commercial company behind the open source Xen Hypervisor, which has picked up the support of some of the biggest names in the industry including Intel, AMD, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, and Red Hat.
Xen’s approach is known as para-virtualization, and requires the operating system to be ported to Xen, and compiled for the virtualization technology, just as developers might compile an operating system for a specific processor. The delivery of processor-level virtualization technologies will enable it to handle unmodified operating systems such as Windows.
Microsoft’s Lees confirmed that Microsoft’s response will be delivered as an update to the Longhorn Server operating system, which is itself expected to arrive shortly after the Longhorn client operating system, due at the end of 2006 (Lees would not be more specific).
The delivery of Microsoft hypervisor technology will also impact other members of Microsoft’s Server System family, he said. The management of these things is very important. It gets very complex in your mind but as long as the software can handle it, it’s okay. Once you do virtualization, you need to have a great console.
