Viridian features cut

Mike Neil, via his blog, advised that in order to ship on time without sacrificing quality, some of the high-end features of Windows Virtualization (a.k.a. Viridian) have been postponed to the subsequent releases:

·         No dynamic addition or removal of CPU and memory

·         No live migration

·         No more than 16 cores overall

Nevertheless, Windows is already a great server virtualization platform, and customers have other options available to them today.

As a Gold certified partner, SWsoft works closely with Microsoft to support customers on the Windows platform. SWsoft is backed by 24-hour, 7-day support from Microsoft for customers operating Windows-based applications within Virtuozzo virtual environments.

We are committed to make all our virtualization products work well with Microsoft virtualization products. Specifically,

·         Parallels products will support Microsoft VHD disk format

·         Virtuozzo management Tools will manage Viridian and Virtual Server

When Viridian is out, you can expect full interoperability, and Viridian will be a seamless addition to your virtualized infrastructure. Considering that VMware has a very cold relationship with Microsoft, you can hardly expect any interoperability between those products.

With regard to the features still-to-come from Microsoft, here are few more reasons to give Virtuozzo a try.

1)    Virtuozzo has always had dynamic resource allocation – you can change how much memory, CPU power, disk space and quite a few of other parameters of a VE (virtual environment) on the fly, in real time. No other server virtualization technology – not VMware ESX, not XEN – support dynamic resource management.

2)    On Linux, Virtuozzo does live VE migration without SAN or any other shared storage, and we’re making a very good progress in implementing the same capability on Windows. Look for that to be delivered soon.

3)    Virtuozzo supports as many CPU cores (or any other resource) as the host OS supports. And for those who need real scalability, Virtuozzo supports Itanium. Again, no other server virtualization technology scales nearly as well. Virtuozzo supports any number of CPUs, any amount of memory or disk space, any number of devices – on the host and in the guests. And there is no performance penalty. When an application in a guest is using 8 CPUs, it does it with the native efficiency of the underlying OS. As for VMware ESX, if you ran any heavy workload in a VM with 4 virtual CPUs, you know the difference very well, especially if you had few more VMs on the same machine.

Users can realize the benefits of virtualization on the Windows platform today and look forward to more coming from Microsoft.