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Viridian drops some core features to ship on time.

Viridian drops some core features to ship. Is it going to be enough to entice …

Virtual Server 2005 small Microsoft will not be shipping all the features in Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) that it previously announced, according to Mike Neil, General Manager, Virtualization Strategy, but WSV will make its new target date. This is unfortunate for Microsoft, because instead of releasing software that has as many or more features then their main competitor—VMware's flagship software, ESX—it will be coming in with what's clearly a smaller feature set.

Microsoft is stuck in a difficult situation. ESX has a reputation for being at least as reliable as physical servers so Microsoft needs to be passably close to them in terms of stability, which is where I suspect much of the development resources are going now. As far as what's not going to be shipped in Viridian, here it is straight from the horse's mouth:

...we are making the following changes, and postponing these features to a future release of Windows Server virtualization:

  • No Live migration
  • No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor)
  • Support limit of 16 cores/logical processors (e.g., 2 processor, quad-core systems is 8 cores; or 4 processor, quad-core system is 16 cores)

I wouldn't count Microsoft out of the data-center virtualization market yet though. Not only does it have access to the source code of the most popular OS to virtualize (that's an assumption on my part, but they have Linux's code as well), it has frequently offered a free or cheap alternative in the past that "just barely gets things done" at launch, then fleshing it out in the future, just to give thrifty customers another reason to look at their software.

The reduced feature set is certainly disappointing; being able to add hardware while the server is up (even RAM or processors!) is sexy, but I have faith that Microsoft will work the kinks out eventually, and when it does, VMware is going to have a fight on its hands.

Channel Ars Technica