SP1 materialises for Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005

By Steve Malone

Posted on 21 Apr 2005 at 10:23

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has announced the availability of the company's Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta version at the annual Microsoft Management Summit. The SP1 will provide support for upcoming Windows Server 2003 x64 editions to provide host operating system support for virtual machine software.

At the same time, he emphasised Microsoft's commitment to interoperability

The Service pack is available at the the Microsoft website. Microsoft estimates that the final version is scheduled to be available by the end of the year.

Virtualisation has become the latest buzzword in corporate organisations. As networks and servers have proliferated, managing them has become increasingly difficult, expensive and time consuming. Often these servers are legacy systems using different operating systems and stand idle for much of the time. Virtualisation consolidates these servers into one manageable piece of hardware that switches between a number of server applications on demand.

Microsoft says it is working with other companies to expand further the support for third-party guest operating systems running on Virtual Server 2005 SP1. These include supposed rivals to Windows such as Unix and Linux. The goal is that Windows Server 2003 and Virtual Server 2005 becomes the enterprise solution to heterogeneous server consolidation of these operating systems, rather than the other way round.

The company has also announced the MOM 2005 management pack for Virtual Server 2005, which provides IT managers with a standardised central way for managing the performance of both physical and virtual machines. Note that Microsoft is now committed to releasing related MOM updates for all major Server System releases.

Finally, Microsoft said it will offer a royalty-free licence to its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) technology to encourage developers to create VHD-based applications that extend the capabilities of the VHD file format.

In his speech, Ballmer tried to allay the fears of managers that do not want to be locked into a single vendor by emphasising Microsoft's commitment to interoperability.

In his speech he told the audience, 'I say it many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times, Microsoft is committed to interoperability, and I'll still get people who will scratch their heads and say, "Are you really committed to interoperability?" And I'll say, "Oh yes we are, look at all we've done. Look at our services for Unix and how we've driven that ahead, look at the work we've done with IBM on standardizing Web services interfaces, we're very committed to interoperability." And people will say, "But are you really committed to interoperability?" And I'll say look at the relationship we announced with Sun a year ago, we are really committed to interoperability.'

So now we know....

But is Microsoft really committed to interoperability?