MS Announces Date for VMM2 beta

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has said it will ship a beta of Virtual Machine Manager 2 this summer, according to a report in The Hypervisor. Observers says this means that the new beta will be unveiled at the Tech Ed show to be held in America in June. According to the article, the new beta will be able to manage VMs running on VMware and XenSource hypervisors, and will also support Microsoft's forthcoming Hyper-V hypervisor. The finished version of VMM2 should follow before the end of the year."

Re:Yeah but

[afidel]

Uh, the virtualization is for Server 2008 where unless you choose to get a ~$10/cpu discount you get a license to run 1 virtual machine for Standard Edition, 4 for Enterprise and unlimited for Datacenter. This is the same rights as 2003R2 with the exception of there are no rights included with 2003R2 Standard.

Re:Bad for VMWare

[koh]

Once MS release VM tools by default with their OS, VMWare has a-lot to lose. I think they'll do it soon, and VMWare will lose a share of the market.

By the way, since Linux kernel 2.6.19-21 (i'm not sure), Linux comes with KVM which is Kernel based Virtual Machine, so If MS do the same, no-one can say that they use their Monopole in the OS market to gain advantage (like in Explorer vs. Netscape issue) since it had been done on Linux before.

KVM is not an hypervisor. KVM is a kernel interface that provides user-mode access to CPU specific virtualization features. From the mandatory wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]:

By itself, KVM does not perform any emulation. Instead, a user-space program uses the /dev/kvm interface to set up the guest VM's address space, feed it simulated I/O and map its video display back onto the host's. Currently, the only such program that does this is a modified version of QEMU.

So VMWare would only need to compete with a free product. Since, last time I checked, VMWare Server [vmware.com] was also free, it would become something like Firefox. If it doesn't lose its way, it won't necessarily fail.

Re:Late, as usual...

[Anonymous Coward]

The real deal shipped already. The announcement is for the beta of version 2.0 of this product. You're confusing the two. Version 1.0 only manages Virtual Server and Hyper-V, Version 2.0 will also manage VMWare and Xen.