Microsoft Wrestles With Virtualization
Saturday, 05 August 2006 by Michel Roth
Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 is built along the same lines as VMware, but requires Windows Server 2003 as the host OS and, unlike VMware ESX Server, it cannot run in a baremetal scenario. The latest release adds a fairly nifty Web Ul and support for Linux VMs (virtual machines); it is also available as a free download.

Microsoft is also preparing Virtual Machine Manager, a virtualization management tool based on Virtual Server 2005 R2. Currently in beta, Microsoft is planning a full release of Virtual Machine Manager later in the year. Virtual Machine Manager has a similar purpose as VMware VirtualCenter, with a few additional features. It includes Microsoft's take on physical-to-virtual migration tools -- limited to Windows servers -- and it borrows from Volume Shadow Copy to perform block-level server migrations.

In spite of all this, Microsoft faces an uphill battle, and these new products may be delivering too little, too late. In preliminary testing, Virtual Server 2005 R2 functions well, but is dogged by performance issues seemingly related to I/O bottlenecks.

Read on at CIO.com.

Related Items:

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 Ready (1 September 2006)
Microsoft Announces Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2 (27 March 2007)
VMware Virtual Machine Importer 2.0 (6 October 2006)
System Center Virtual Machine Manager Beta 1 Available For Download (8 August 2006)
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Release Candidate (19 April 2007)
Real Control with Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (23 January 2008)
ESXGuide Releases ESX Manager 2.1 (18 July 2007)
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