Less than a month after pushing back the delivery date for its Windows Server virtualization technology, Microsoft decided Viridian would not arrive in the first half of the 2007 and instead was pushed to the second half of 2007. Citing quality concerns, Viridian will not include Live migration, or hot-add resources for storage, networking, memory and processors, which allow developers to move, add or remove resources without taking the machine down, and it will limit support to 16 cores, or four quad-core processors. "The focus for the release of Windows Server virtualization is quality and timeliness. To meet those objectives, Microsoft has made some hard decisions and now plans to defer some features to a later release."
Mike Neil, general manager of Microsoft's virtualization strategy explained that Microsoft wanted to spill the news to the public so "no one is surprised at WinHEC when we demo all the other innovations in Windows Server virtualization." Microsoft first demonstrated Viridian and released technical content of the new architecture at last year's WinHEC show. Microsoft describes Viridian as a thin software layer between the hardware and the Windows Server Longhorn operating system that will allow several operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time. With the hypervisor, Microsoft hopes to challenge EMC subsidiary VMware, the biggest provider of virtualization software.
News source: InternetNews
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