Microsoft blesses VM technology
Tim Landgrave
Published: 11 Mar 2003 09:25 GMT
Training environment
One of the biggest complaints about technical training is that companies are unable to train on the same environment that they use for their own development and production. Using VM technology, you can create a complex, multiserver environment for training and allow it to run on individual machines or a shared server. Companies like Volant Training provide courseware designed to take advantage of a VM environment.
Application migration
One of the key drivers for Microsoft was to give corporations the ability to keep running their legacy Windows NT 4.0 applications while moving to new platforms like Windows 2003 Server. By including the VM technology as an add-on to Windows 2003 Server, a company can realise cost efficiencies by consolidating multiple Windows NT 4.0 servers and their applications onto a single Windows 2003 Server box.
Server consolidation
Even if you're not running legacy Microsoft operating systems, the Connectix technology has some huge benefits for the data center and remote offices. For example, suppose you want to run a copy of ISA Server, Exchange 2000, and Windows 2003 as a Primary Domain Controller at each of your 100 remote locations. Without this technology, you would need to buy and support three machines for each location, even though their utilisation would be fairly low. With this technology, you can buy a single one- or two-processor machine and run the PDC on the host operating system and ISA and Exchange on VMs by themselves. In the data center, you can take multiple applications that require their own hardware and run them on a single multiprocessor box on their own VMs.
VM technology standards
With Microsoft's blessing of the technology, I expect to see many companies begin implementing it. Some will choose to use the Microsoft technology, while others will use the more mature and battle-tested VMware product. Your choice will depend on whether you'd rather have support from Microsoft directly or depend on a third party like VMware to support mission-critical application servers.
But VMware may not be your only choice for support. VMware already has alliances with hardware vendors like IBM, HP, and Unisys. And given its experience and focus on providing rich Windows VM solutions on top of Linux, I think VMware will ultimately align with (or be purchased by) IBM. Regardless of the fate of VMware as a company, the Microsoft acquisition of Connectix means that virtual machine technology will move rapidly into corporate data centers over the next three years.
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