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Microsoft Sheds More Light On Windows Hypervisor Technology

Friday, 07 April 2006 by Michel Roth

An interesting article on Eweek.com: "While Microsoft's Windows Hypervisor technology, code-named Viridian and currently under development, will not be ready when Windows "Longhorn" Server ships sometime next year, company officials are optimistic that it will be available "sooner rather than later." But they are not yet prepared to say exactly when "sooner" might be, especially in light of the recently announced slips in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007. Viridian is technology that will run beneath the operating system and manage resources for multiple virtual machines.

"While Viridian will be delivered after Longhorn Server ships, Longhorn will be virtualization-ready," Mike Neil, product unit manager for Microsoft's virtualization technologies, told eWEEK at the annual LinuxWorld Conference here.

"The Xen and Viridian hypervisor architectures are actually more similar than they are different, and the inclusion of this technology into the Linux distributions broadens the market and ecosystem around this technology, which is good for all of us," he said.

But Neil did acknowledge that the fact that VMware has made its VMware Server product available for free and both Red Hat and Novell's SUSE are baking the Xen virtualization technology into their server products had put pressure on Microsoft to also make its virtualization software available for free.

Read the whole article here.