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UPDATE: David’s blog posting and images are now gone. My Spanish is not very good, but I don’t see an explanation on his blog.

It’s been 2 months since I last posted about WSV. Still not much happening. The first public beta of WSV has been pushed back to the 2nd half of 2007, but that has been widely publicized.

Today i ran into this translated article by David Cervigón, a Microsoft evangelist. It reveals a little bit of information that I had not known before, along with some screenshots. The original article is in Spanish.

Here is a list things that I thought were interesting.
* Remote console connection via RDP
* VLAN tagging support and vSwitches.

Still no talk of vMotion like support. This is a feature that I consider a requirement to compete with VMware. I have heard rumors of the plans here, but nothing that MS has announced so I will leave it alone for now.

jeremy WSV

It’s the first snow day in a long time here in Minnesota, so I have some free time in between snow blowing and shoveling.  I honestly haven’t been following Microsoft’s virtualization offerings in a while.  It’s time to see what they are up to.

To make it clear where I stand, by offerings I mean future products.  Virtual Server is out there and is a competitor to VMware server (GSX).  I’m more interested in something that can compete on a larger enterprise scale.  I am interested in the details of Windows Server Virtualization (WSV), codename Viridian.  In general, my bare minimum requirements for a product to compete with VI3 are the ability to move VM’s between hosts while online (vMotion).

This all started when I ran into this video today.  The video shows hot adding a nic to a VM.

http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/archive/2007/02/28/longhorn-hypervisor-demo.aspx

So first, what is the status of WSV/Viridian?  When can I run the beta?

• Hmm.  Only the final release on the radar for 2008 over at the virtualization.info roadmap.  http://www.virtualization.info/roadmap/Roadmap_2007.png
• The Windows Virtualization team blog is not so helpful with both posts from last spring.
  http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/default.aspx
• This one does not help at all.
  http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2007/02/25/Where-we_2700_re-headed-with-virtualization.aspx

I give up.  I read somewhere that a private beta released end of 2006.  I would assume we can see some bits following the release of Longhorn beta 3.

So, the following pieces make up Microsoft’s new virtualization initiative.

• WSV/Viridian
• Server Core (headless windows) - This one should be useful in any virtualization scenario and not really part of MS virtualization.
• Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager

So far, the details are few.  Some standard things, such as

• 8 vCPUs
• Hot add different devices

These things are good, but I am curious about a couple critical points.

1. Price.  How will this be licensed?
2. Shared filesystems (VMFS).  How do I vMotion without VMFS?
3. Networking.  How do they accomplish the equivalent of vSwitches and port groups.

I will follow up as I uncover details. 

jeremy WSV