Volish Vista virtualisation battered

MICROSOFT HAS BEEN QUAKING in its big, furry, Volish boots over virtualisation, if this betanews.com article is to be believed.

Supposedly, after some virtualisation doo-dads were toyed with to stick an active rootkit to a beta Vista kernal, Microsoft got so worried that it contemplated giving Vista virtualisation the boot. As you may well be aware, virtualisation functions were left out of the Vista home editions.

Betanews decided to chase up the Vole on this, and extracted the following from a Volish spinster: "Virtualization is a fairly new technology, and one that we think is not yet mature enough from a security perspective for broad consumer adoption."

Vole's spinnah went on to say that the customers actually bothering with Windows virtualisation are business customers or technology enthusiasts, and not your average user. Though the average user so far doesn't seem to be using Vista, either.

VMware is on Microsoft's case, too, having attacked the Vole's policies on virtualisation. The company reckons that Microsoft is going all out "trying to restrict customers' flexibility and freedom to choose virtualisation software by limiting who can run their software and how they can run it."

Microsoft has been accused by VMware of posting language which restricts the use of the "VHD-formatted VMs - or VHDs - to MS Virtual Server and/or Virtual PC only." VMware products run VHDs without a quarrel, the company says.

You can find a list of VMware's Microsoft gripes over here at Microsoft blog All about Microsoft. µ