- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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IA32 is pushing elephants up steep hills - Bob Colwell, former chief architect at Intel
Microsoft releases virtualisation additions for Linux
MICROSOFT has released some things it calls Virtual Machine Additions for Linux, which apparently are add-ons for its Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.
Microsoft says they are designed to "...improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines..." on that Volish server OS.
It seems these virtualisaton add-ons enable Microsoft host and Linux guest synchronisation for time-keeping and heartbeat generation as well as coordinated server shutdown. They also support sharing the mouse driver, display driver and SCSI hard disk emulation.
One can imagine there must be some people out there who want to run both Windows and Linux servers on the same machine, perhaps as an aid to migration from Windows to Linux.
But nonetheless, this smacks somewhat of the Vole getting desperate, as in, "Please, please keep Windows. You can run Linux under it."
There are more details here. µ
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"They also support sharing the mouse driver, display driver ..."

Has the Vole ever worked on a linux server??? I have yet to see a mouse plugged into a linux server (lol) and who actually leaves a monitor plugged into one too.

Has the vole ever heard of ssh or in its case putty.

Trust the Vole for such a statement.
They would never have sold it otherwise. Time-keeping is a bitch under VMWare if you don't have VMWare Tools installed.

GUI systems are awful through the console without it, too.

So yeah, it's sort-of 'please keep Windows' but it's also a necessity - they're scrabbling to catch-up.

It doesn't help their host OS requires more memory than the guests (if running Linux VMs), especially when you look at the flip-story.
Rah-rah Linux.

Microsoft sucks. Obviously they are playing catch-up to VMware. Pick your favorite of the following statements:

"I hate Microsoft because they only allow their OS and products to work with other Microsoft products"

"I hate MIcrosoft because they release add-ons to work with other products"

You get both at The Inquirer, depending on the week!
I run a comercial service where I supply VMware RHEL servers as guests on Windows 2003. This is for the simple reason that RHEL does firewalls and mail filters much better than Windows.

I use a second LAN port that is 'owned' by the RHEL guest and do all firewall and mail stuff through that and then forward it to the windows host via a shared LAN port.

Problems? Yes a few. First the damned windows operators perpetually reboot the system for patches and upgrades - keeping my uptime down to windows standards.

Second, timekeeping is a big problem using VMware and I have yet to see a completely satisfactory solution. If MS have a good fix I may move from VMware to their offering.
I personally run Linux under VMWare all the time. For developing PHP / MySQL applications under Windows I find it an effective way to cut electricity costs by running my testing server as a Virtual Machine. And if something goes amiss I can simply swap it out with a recent, or template image without affecting my production server. Cheers.
No use to anyone - VM Server only what about VM PC for all those users at home..?
I don’t think this is Microsoft getting desperate. I think this is Microsoft defending its monopoly from future lawsuits. The defence goes something like this: We support full interoperability with competing products like Linux. As long as the competitors run it on top of windows. It is technically impossible for us to interoperate any other way without disclosing our patents, IP etc. So if you want to run linux and communicate with windows you can as long as you run windows. See win win for Microsoft.