Posts Tagged ‘hyper-v’

Microsoft Embraces GPL?

Satan better invest in a parka and that theoretical pig better invest in a parachute in case its flight is short-lived. Microsoft today released a Linux driver for its Hyper-V virtualization layer under (here’s where it gets interesting) the GNU GPLv2. Yes, the same Microsoft who at one time told us that the GPL was “anti-American”.

By releasing the drivers under the GPL, they’ve not only validated Linux as a value-add to run on top of Hyper-V, but they’ve also validated free software as a whole by contributing the code to the community the way any other open source vendor would. Ironically, Microsoft is actually ahead of several other companies in releasing their drivers under the open source GPL license. The driver is no doubt a move to help boost its Hyper-V market share, but it’s a critical move that Microsoft needs to get customers who would have otherwise chosen a product like VMware, KVM, or Xen. Greg Kroah-Hartman from Novell says that Microsoft will be maintaining and adding new features to the code as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jul 21st, 2009

Ballmer Picks on Competitors Over.. Cost?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently talked about Microsoft’s virtualization strategy for the next few years. In the video interview on ZDnet, Ballmer talks about democratizing virtualization.

He says that currently only 5% of servers are virtualized, and Microsoft has the key to making it more like 80%. Of course he took a shot at VMware, saying:

“If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization!”

Wait. What just happened here? I had to watch the video twice before I believed it. The CEO of Microsoft is going to give a lecture on over-priced software licenses? I almost fell off my chair when I heard him say that. Wow, I completely didn’t expect that. I expected some statement about how their software is better or something like that, but not that they were cheaper. Two things

1. Is Microsoft really going to bring up licensing costs as an argument for using their platform? Let’s say, for instance, that I want to upgrade my existing desktop from XP with Office 2003 to Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 Pro. Hardware upgrade costs aside, I can buy a Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade for $184.99 from Newegg. Then, I need to buy the Office 2007 upgrade. A professional version upgrade will cost me $289.99 on Newegg. That’s a total of $474.98. Now, let’s say I want to buy myself the upgrades for my Mac. I can spend $109.95 on the Leopard license from Newegg and iWork ‘08 for $68.99. Yes, we can clearly see that Microsoft is definitely in a position to brag about licensing costs. Anyway, that’s another argument for another day.

2. Is it really free? According to the documentation, in order for the clustering to work you have to use Windows Server Enterprise or Datacenter edition on the bare metal. Well, being the curious soul that I am, I decided to find the cost. You can buy an OEM copy of Enterprise edition (the cheaper version) for the low cost of $2,699.99 from Newegg. Now we’re over halfway to the cost of ESX server and with ESX you don’t have the performance and management cost of running a full-blow Windows OS underneath everything else. Plus, I can’t live-migrate my virtual machines across physical machines like Xen or VMware. I’m going to leave alone the fact that you can’t access the hypervisor features using “unsupported” OS’s, like you know.. not Windows or SUSE Linux.

In true Microsoft style, they are late to the game and feature-poor, yet they try to push their weight around and make ridiculous claims. I didn’t start this blog to become a Microsoft-basher, but they make it so difficult not to. Sadly, I’m projecting that Hyper-V will become fairly popular simply because it comes bundled within the Windows server OS, just like Internet Explorer is one of the dominating browsers simply out of convenience.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Sep 27th, 2008

Microsoft Offers Hyper-V for Free

In true Microsoft style, long after other competing products have been offering free versions of their software, Microsoft announced yesterday that the new version of its Hyper-V product will be free. Competitors VMware and Xen have been offering free virtualization software for some time now with pay-for management features. Microsoft appears to be jumping on the bandwagon. According to cnet, the new version will be released in less than 30 days. Microsoft also is reporting that the new Live Migration feature (once again, available in VMware and Xen) will be available in the new version. Live Migration was promised in the first version, but wasn’t developed in time to be released with the first version. It will allow a virtual machine to be migrated to another physical host while the virtual machine is running. The new version will be part of Server 2008 R2.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Sep 9th, 2008