Microsoft promises VMware beater despite reversals
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Blames media, not own, confusion WPC Microsoft has delivered a spirited defense of its Windows virtualization roadmap, blaming misreporting not internal disorganization for causing confusion.â¦
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New virtual-machine technology can be used to test software patches and migrate aging Windows NT applications. By John Foley, Paula Rooney, CRN.
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In an online white paper published last Friday, VMware takes Microsoft to task for allegedly rigging the market for virtualization software to protect Windows. The paper's language and allegations recall to mind the dark days of 1996, when Microsoft was first challenged in court over its use of artificial roadblocks prohibiting Windows 3.0 and 3.1 from running in its competitor's DR DOS operating system.
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VMware offers its app free, but competitors ask whether it treats all virtualization products equally.
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Go virtual, go nuts Microsoft, of all companies, continues to lead the way with free and loose licensing terms around server virtualization software and multi-core processors.â¦
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InfoWorld - Two makers of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Apple&#39;s computers have issued dueling upgrades this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Two makers of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Apple's computers have issued dueling upgrades this week. VMware said Friday it's going to release sometime in June a beta 2 upgrade to itsÂ VMware virtualization software for the Mac, code-named Fusion. It will be an upgrade to the desktop virtualization for Macs product it first introduced in April 2006. Rival ParallelsÂ unveiled an updateÂ to its Desktop for Macs software on Feb. 27. Both use virtualization to run Microsoft's Windows on an Apple computer and make it possible for the user to switch from Mac to Windows without having to reboot. Among the improvements in VMware's Fusion is its ability to run Windows-designed 3-D gaming software on a Mac, said Dan Chu, VMware's vice president of emerging products and markets. "There's been a ton of traffic about this on the blogs," said Chu, about discussions by end-users anticipating the beta 2 release. Chu also noted that Fusion will be able to run software programs written in the 64-bit and 32-bit encryption protocols, while Parallels only supports the older 32-bit standard. True, admits Benjamin Rudolph, a Parallels spokesman, but said his company will add the 64-bit standard in its upgrade, due later this year. It will also offer the 3-D graphics capability Fusion, announced Friday. But a key feature of the new Parallels Desktop announced Tuesday is a program it calls Coherence, which runs Windows applications on Mac's OS X as though they were native. When users switch to Coherence mode, Rudolph said, the Windows desktop disappears but Windows applications, such as Word, Outlook or Internet Explorer run on the Mac desktop and their icons appear in the Mac application dock. "Coherence in particular, speaks to the innovation we put out here at Parallels," he said. "That's something nobody really has done before." Fusion also enables merging of Mac and Windows applications, but "it has a different user interface" than Parallels, said Chu. The Mac desktop will be visible and a Windows window will open in a portion of the screen from which the Windows applications can be launched. Although VMware is clearly the industry leader in virtualization, it's largely focused on enterprise virtualization of servers. Parallels focuses on the niche Fusion is going after, that of running Windows on a Mac. "I think we're far ahead of them on virtualizing the Mac," Rudolph said. Parallels' newest version of its Mac product lists for $79.99, although existing users can download the upgrade for free. VMware's currently available version is free, but Chu would not disclose the price at which VMware's beta 2 will sell when it hits the market.
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(InfoWorld) - VMware is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals Monday to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their datacenters. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them. VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical datacenter workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database, and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows. VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks. Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results. VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware. VMware is represented on the 13-member SPEC work group that is developing the virtualization benchmark along with competitors such as SWsoft and Trigence. Major technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Intel are also represented. "We have created VMmark to be an open standard," said Eubanks. "In order to prevent misconceptions of what our intentions are. ... we presented our technology preview to SPEC so they could use it as the basis of the open-standards benchmark. We want to improve our product, we don't want to cook our benchmarks." VMware is introducing VMmark while the SPEC panel is still developing its standards. "The process to becoming a standard is a quite long one," said Eubanks. But VMware has not always been as impartial as it claims to be, said John Bara, vice president of marketing for XenSource, a VMware competitor. Bara says VMware released a white paper earlier this year comparing VMware's ESX Server hypervisor to XenSource's Open Source Xen hypervisor on a Windows operating system and the results showed VMware performed better. Bara says the comparison was not fair because Open Source Xen is optimized to run best on Linux, not Windows. XenSource's Xen Enterprise product is optimized to run Windows and would be a more balanced comparison to VMware's ESX. "We cooperate with VMware in a lot of areas, but we went back to them and said 'foul,'" said Bara. To VMware's credit, he said, it redid the test and accepted the revised benchmark that showed VMware ESX and Xen Enterprise with nearly comparable performance. Also Monday, XenSource entered into an OEM agreement with Symantec Corp. to embed Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation virtualized storage management software into Xen Source's XenEnterprise virtualization hypervisor.
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Mounting problem forces software giant to release VML patch ahead of its monthly security update.
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Not satisfied with its prominent position on servers and workstations, VMware charged the desktop with a new software package that creates &quot;containers&quot; of applications that can be centrally managed by an administrator.
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Three years between betas VMware has hoisted a revamped version of its ACE desktop virtualization software onto a beta testing site.â¦
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Although users may still see their computers' CPUs maxed out at 100%, Microsoft Corp. maintains that patches for a Windows Update lockup problem do fix the flaw.
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Microsoft Thursday did something it rarely does. The company released a beta for a long-awaited technology -- in this case its Windows Server 2008 virtualization technology Hyper-V -- ahead of schedule.Hyper-V, formerly code-named &quot;Viridian,&quot; is now available for download from Microsoft&#39;s Web site and is ready to be used with the current x64 beta version of Windows Server 2008, which is also available online. The technology, called a hypervisor, is the underlying virtualization technology for the server release, which is a major update that&#39;s expected to be released on Feb. 27, 2008. A beta of Hyper-V originally was planned to be released on that date as well.Virtualization, or the ability to use virtual machine technology to run multiple OSes on a physical server, is widely seen as a disruptive technology and is becoming increasingly important as companies seek to cut costs and consolidate hardware in their data centers and IT environments. Microsoft had originally intended to release Hyper-V as part of the original release Windows Server 2008, but the technology was delayed and is now scheduled to be generally available 180 days, or about six months, after Windows Server 2008 ships. Hyper-V&#39;s released was delayed earlier this year because Microsoft opted to pull out some originally planned features.Hyper-V takes advantage of virtualization-optimized microprocessors from Intel and&#160;AMD and is meant to help Microsoft compete with virtualization leader VMware, which already has hypervisor technology on the market. Hypervisors allow for cross-platform support so servers can run multiple versions of different OSes -- such as Windows and Linux -- side by side on one piece of hardware.Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server at Microsoft, said customers have been asking the company for a built-in virtualization technology that works directly within the Windows Server environment so it&#39;s easy to manage and implement. By design, Hyper-V is set up as what Microsoft calls a &quot;role&quot; within Windows Server 2008, and can be turned on or off as a customer wishes, he said. Roles are a new feature of the forthcoming release of the OS that allow servers to be set up so only the role or roles a customer wants them to play in the IT environment -- such as e-mail server or application server -- will be turned on.Mike Neal, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft, said Hyper-V is meant to make the virtualization market &quot;a two-horse race&quot; between Microsoft and VMware. However, with Hyper-V not scheduled to ship until the second half of next year, the company has a lot of ground to make up to topple VMware from its leadership position. And Microsoft also faces pressure in providing built-in OS virtualization from Linux leader Red Hat, which already has integrated cross-platform virtualization into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.Windows Server 2008 eventually will be available in multiple editions and will be offered with and without Hyper-V. Microsoft also plans to release a product called Microsoft Hyper-V Server specifically as a virtualization host environment in the second half of 2008.
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VMware tests a desktop virtualization program that runs on a USB drive.
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'Longhorn' improves security and management, but drops virtualization functions.
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Security-conscious IT managers stand to gain a promising new option today, as a novel tool from software virtualisation pioneer VMware enters beta testing.
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Although Microsoft is at least 18 months away from releasing its Windows server virtualization tool, code-named Viridian, Redmond on Thursday released software that does what market-leader VMware&#39;s apps cannot.