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| Virtual Server 2005 Supports Testing and Flexibility |
| Sep. 27, 2004 |
Virtual Server 2005 will be generally available in Oct. 2004. The product creates a virtual environment on a host OS so that a guest OS and application can run as if they had their own dedicated computer. Customers can use Virtual Server for development and testing of new applications, or to run older applications on new servers. However, some tools required to manage production servers will not be available for several months, and even though the environment is virtual, all the licenses for each software installation on each virtual machine must be real. Virtualization Supports Testing and Flexibility Since acquiring Connectix in Feb. 2003, Microsoft has shipped Virtual PC for Mac, which creates a virtual Windows environment on Mac OS X, and Virtual PC 2004, which creates a virtual PC environment on Windows 2000 and XP Professional. (For an overview of Virtual PC and the basic architecture of the virtualization technology, see "First Virtual PC Product Released" on page 11 of the Dec. 2003 Update.) Now Microsoft is adding Virtual Server 2005 to help customers create virtual servers on Windows Server 2003. Customers use virtualization for several reasons, including the following: Application development testing. When testing a server application or Web-based application, a single computer with several virtual servers can emulate all the servers that would typically be present in the test application's production environment. Software evaluation. Virtual servers allow IT staff to emulate portions of their organization's production environment to evaluate and test new software before putting it into production. Legacy application support. Applications that require an older OS version, such as Windows NT 4.0, can run as guest applications on Windows Server 2003. By supporting older applications with virtualization, companies can consolidate servers onto newer hardware and OSs, or keep an old application working while migrating to a newer version. Disaster recovery. Virtual servers allow IT staff to continue running a production application on a different server while repairing a failed production server. Virtual Server Capabilities Virtual Server 2005 uses Windows Server 2003 as the host OS for virtual servers that will be used in production, although Microsoft also supports Windows XP Professional as the host OS for testing scenarios. Virtual servers created on the host OS have the following characteristics: Processors. Each virtual server emulates only a single x86-based CPU. Although Virtual Server can run on up to 32 physical processors, a guest OS can see only a single CPU per virtual server. Storage. Virtual servers emulate either IDE/ATAPI or SCSI adapters for storage. The emulated IDE adapter supports up to 128GB of storage per channel, which can be disk, CD/DVD-ROM, or ISO images. The SCSI adapter emulates the Adaptec 7870 SCSI controller with four virtual SCSI buses. Virtual SCSI storage can range up to 56.5 terabytes. Virtual Server 2005 supports two-node failover clustering between virtual machines by means of shared SCSI storage, which does not provide fault-tolerance in the advent of a hardware failure, but is useful for developers to test failover scenarios. The fully supported guest OSs include Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Server. Customers can run other guest OSs, such as Linux. However, Microsoft will not support these configurations unless the customer can show that any problem lies with the virtualization software or host OS, not the non-Microsoft guest OS. Although Virtual Server resembles Virtual PC 2004, Microsoft has performed a complete security review of the code, similar to the review it conducted on Windows Server 2003 as part of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. Virtual Server also has several improvements for managing virtualized services, such as the following:
No Virtual Licenses Customers using virtualization technology have to be careful about licensing. Licensing virtual servers correctly involves licensing three layers (illustrated in "Virtual Server Licensing"): The host OS—either Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP Professional—has to be licensed for the hardware. Virtual Server 2005 has to be licensed for the hardware. Standard Edition is required for servers with four or less processors and Enterprise Edition for servers with up to 32 processors. Guest OS and applications. Each guest OS has to be licensed to run on the virtual server. In addition, Client Access Licenses (CALs) used to access the guest OS must be updated to the host OS. So, for instance, when moving a legacy Windows NT 4.0 application to run on a virtual server, the customer will not only need an NT 4.0 server license but will also need Windows Server 2003 CALs for all clients accessing the application, even if those clients already have CALs for NT 4.0. Server applications that use a per-processor licensing model and are running on the guest OS have to be licensed based on the total number of physical processors on the host machine—even though each virtual machine can use only a single processor. CEC and DSI At its TechEd conference in May 2004, Microsoft announced the Common Engineering Criteria (CEC), a set of release criteria for products that are designed to ensure consistency and integration across the Windows Server System product line. Virtual Server 2005 is one of the first products to ship under CEC for 2005, and by the end of 2004, it should get a pass for most of the first year’s criteria. For example, Systems Management Server (SMS) with Service Pack 1 can inventory and manage a Virtual Server host as well as the guest OSs and applications of its virtual servers. The Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) systems monitoring product will be able to monitor the health of Virtual Server with the addition of a management pack planned for the end of 2004. All applications in the Windows Server System line, such as Exchange and SQL Server, will run on virtual servers. Status of one CEC criterion—64-bit support—is harder to assess. Virtual Server 2005 will run on the 64-bit versions of Windows Server for the AMD x86-64 and Intel IA32e 64-bit processor families; both families support native execution of 32-bit applications. But Virtual Server 2005 will not run on the Intel Itanium processor. Even on the 64-bit processors with native 32-bit execution support Virtual Server is running as a 32-bit application, so it is not gaining the greater performance and larger memory capability of these 64-bit processors. Microsoft is also promoting Virtual Server as a key deliverable in its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), Microsoft’s far-reaching plan to improve the manageability of Windows systems and applications. One of the ways that Microsoft believes that DSI will benefit customers is with the "dynamic data center," where OS services and hardware resources can be pooled and dynamically allocated to applications according to policies, rather than being bound to specific applications. Virtualization could be one way to deliver this capability. With the release of the Microsoft Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT—currently in beta and expected to be released before the end of 2004), administrators will be able to leverage the Automated Deployment Service (a feature pack for Windows Server 2003 that facilitates deploying servers) to migrate a physical server to a virtual server, a step toward the dynamic data center goal. At this point, however, customers should note that VMWare’s virtual products make an equal contribution to this goal. Although Microsoft will not discuss future versions of Virtual Server, creating a version of Virtual Server that installs directly on the hardware, or with a slimmed down included host OS designed to boot and load the virtual server, could expand the role of virtualization for partitioning large servers, further contributing to DSI goals. Availability and Resources There are two editions of Virtual Server 2005: Standard Edition, which supports up to four processors and costs US$499, and Enterprise Edition, which supports up to 32 physical processors and costs US$999. The editions are the same in all other respects and include the same features. Detailed technical information and access to an evaluation version of Virtual Server 2005 is available at www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx. Background on the Common Engineering Criteria is available in "Common Criteria Promote Consistency" on page 7 of the Aug. 2004 Update. Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative is described in "Long-Term Plan for Manageability" on page 11 of the May 2003 Update. |
