Rivals boost virtualisation tools

Announcements push virtualisation on commodity hardware further into the enterprise

The nascent market for virtualisation on commodity hardware is heating up as Microsoft, XenSource and Virtual Iron Software build out capabilities to challenge sector leader VMware. At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week in Boston, Microsoft said it was making Virtual Server 2005 R2 available as a free download.

Microsoft said the move was in keeping with its strategy of making virtualisation less risky and less costly. Last year, the firm opened up Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition so that up to four versions can be run without incurring extra costs.

It also represents an attempt to keep pace with virtualisation leader VMware, which last year made its GSX product free.

"It's a logical step for them," said Richard Garsthagen, VMware technical marketing manager. "They were trying to sell their products for almost no money, and it was becoming very difficult. We made ours free not because of competition from Microsoft but to proliferate the VM technology."

In another significant change, Microsoft said it has also adapted Virtual Server to run Red Hat and Novell Suse Linux distributions as guest operating systems, and will provide 24-hour technical support for companies seeking to run Linux side by side with Windows.

In a Q&A on Microsoft's web site, Zane Adam, director of product marketing in the Windows Server division, said, "Customers with questions on the interoperability of Linux guest operating systems and the virtual machine add-ins will be able to access the standard Microsoft support process."

However, some experts said that firms' requirements are usually to virtualise a single operating system to perform evaluations or run partitioned workloads.

In a recent interview with IT Week, Red Hat chief technology officer Brian Stevens said that the large majority of virtualisation deployments he saw ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux alone. "Ninety-five percent seem to be homogeneous," he added. "Even with VMware we haven't seen IT go to that model."

In a dig at VMware, Microsoft suggested that its plans to deliver the next-generation "Windows Longhorn" Server with virtualisation built in will deter firms from making large investments in rival virtualisation technology today.

Further out, Microsoft plans a service pack for Virtual Server 2005 R2 to allow the software to support Intel and AMD on-chip virtualisation capabilities. A beta version is due in the next eight weeks and a full release scheduled for early 2007.

Elsewhere, XenSource showed off its XenEnterprise program that can run on Windows systems. A commercial release is due by October this year.

Also at LinuxWorld, Virtual Iron said it would use the Xen open-source hypervisor technology to run Linux and Windows. The firm said that version 3.0 of Virtual Iron will have native support for Intel's Virtualisation Technology (VT). A beta release of version 3.0 for Linux guests will be available in July with Windows to follow in September.

Tom Bittman, vice-president at analyst Gartner, said, "Xen's gathering vendor support and the increasingly urgent need to solve the problems of 'server sprawl' sets the stage for a potentially dramatic industry shift."