Microsoft Pushes Ahead on Virtualization, Clustering

Computerworld - Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server division, provided an update on the company's plans for its server operating system and related products during an interview at the TechEd 2005 conference in Orlando this month. Excerpts follow:
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in April, Microsoft said it was leaning toward eliminating your virtualization server software as a stand-alone product in the future. Can you flesh out any more details on the plans? Today, we have a product called Virtual Server that sits on top of Windows and provides virtualization capabilities. In the future, we're going to build the hypervisor and the virtualization stack into Windows. So while it's a whole new set of technologies, much, if not all, of what Virtual Server does today goes into the operating system. It becomes an operating system feature. At the same time, we're building a whole set of management services that will exist under [our] System Center [product line]. I do think that this is going to be a new product.

So you'll have a product with management capabilities for virtualized environments? Some management capabilities. Patching of images and image deployment, that's in [Systems Management Server]. Monitoring virtualized systems, that's a [Microsoft Operations Manager] feature. But there are some new features that are very important from the management perspective, like moving virtualized sessions from one machine to another. We don't have a product that does that today.

Will the built-in virtualization capabilities ship with the Longhorn version of Windows, or after Longhorn? In [April], we talked about it as "the Longhorn time frame." And it still is the time frame. When we think about operating system generations, I think about the '07 generations of the operating system - say, '07 to '08 - as all being Longhorn, maybe even to '09 for Longhorn R2. . . . So the virtualization features are in the Longhorn time frame, but it's not in the initial release of Longhorn.

Bob Muglia of Microsoft Corp.