June 20, 2005 (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.
Microsoft said it will ship a Compute Cluster Edition of Windows Server 2003 in the first half of next year. Why do you want to get into the high-performance computing market? It's about time. It's one of the faster-growing segments of the server business.
How different will the cluster edition be from the other versions of Windows Server 2003? It's the same operating system with two differences. One, we basically turn off a bunch of workloads, so you can't do a bunch of other things on it, because it will be priced very competitively. Pricing on this will actually be less than the Standard Edition for the operating systempiece itself. Then there's a whole set of services that need to run on top of that - batch schedulers, the ability to connect these computers with high-performance connections and those [kinds of] things. Even in the Linux space today, people tend to buy those things from commercial companies, and they pay a fair amount for it. I think we'll have a very competitive offering.
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Virtualization is about a lot more than just lowering total cost of ownership. In fact users that have taken an open source path to virtualization have realized the additional, mission-critical benefit of markedly reduced IT complexity, as well as a more flexible infrastructure that is easier to change to meet shifting, often unpredictable business requirements.
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