Microsoft has delayed the release of
two key virtualisation components.
The release of the public beta for Viridian, the virtualisation technology
that is being built into Windows Server codenamed Longhorn, has been pushed back
from the first half to the second half of this year. Microsoft also will delay
the release of Virtual Server 2005
R2 service pack 1 from the first to the second quarter of this year, Mike Neil
general manager for Microsoft's virtualisation strategy wrote on a
company
blog.
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He stressed that the delay will have no impact on the beta 3 release of
Windows Server Longhorn. The third
and final beta is due out in the first half of 2007 and the final product has
been promised for the end of this year. Viridian will be made available as an
update with 180 days after the Longhorn launch.
Microsoft wasn't satisfied with the performance and scalability of Viridian
on servers with multiple processors, Neil explained in the blog posting.
"We still have some work to do to have the beta meet the 'scale up' bar we
have set. Also, we're tuning Windows Server virtualisation to run demanding
enterprise IT workloads, even I/O intensive workloads, so performance is very
important and we still have some work to do here," Neil wrote.
He also claimed that Windows Server virtualisation will be the only
application to support up to 64 CPUs.
Neil's claims about reaching new heights in the number of supported CPUs
seems at odds with reality.
Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 scales up to 1024 CPUs, although the
largest production system today has a 'mere' 512 CPUs, a company spokesperson
told vnunet.com. The operating system
supports the open source Xen virtualisation technology.
Solaris 10 too offers virtualisation support. The largest system that it
ships on is Sun Microsystem's E25k server,
featuring 72 dual-core SPARCIV+ processors.
The release of service pack 1 for Virtual Server 2005 R2 is delayed because
Microsoft needed to test last minute additions of support for Solaris 10,
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 and
the latest build of Windows Server Longhorn to run as guest operating systems.
The update also will introduce support for virtualisation accelleration
technologies that AMD and Intel have built into their processors.
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