I'll take three... no, make that forty...

Microsoft today announces new pricing on Virtual Server 2005 R2.

In an effort to remove the vaguaries introduced by currency exchange and commissions, the price is the same in all currencies.

The Virtual Server product line allows you to create "virtual computers" inside your system, and control when and how they run.  Here are some great potential uses for them:

  1. Testing suspicious sites without infecting your main machine. [Yes, it's much safer to use a physically separate machine, but hey... what can you do?]
  2. Debugging malware to find out what it does and how to trap it. [Again, a physical separation is better...]
  3. Creating a truly 'offline' root certificate authority (burn the Virtual Hard Drive onto a CD-ROM) that is easy to lock away.
  4. Trying patches out without sacrificing your main machine.
  5. Comparing different operating systems in their reactions to tools / patches / malware.

I'm sure there are many more uses that you can think of.  These are just some that come to my mind immediately.

Do you have any other ideas?

Published Mon, Apr 3 2006 10:01 by Alun Jones
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Comments

# re: I'll take three... no, make that forty...

I have a better idea.. download VMWare Server.. now also free, more robust, better performing, better support for linux, remote console support with kerberos/AD integration, ability to build snapshots of system state.. and more.

Microsoft is a bit late.. but at least they have arrived.

Problem is.. both of these virtulization strategies SUCK! They are clunky and heavyweight because they have to emulate an entire machine.

More interesting is Xen with hardware enabled virtulazation. Intel has enabled processor virtulization with their core chips and has published a scheme for I/O virtulazation for them although implementation is a bit farther off... AMDs next chips will ALL support their Pacifica virtulization which from day 1 will have processor and I/O virtulization support. Couple this with their hypertransport mesh connections and you have something akin to mainframe level virtulization across multiple physical system nodes.. really a quasi-x64 mainframe. Both Intel and AMD virtulization will allow Xen to offer much lighterweight virtulization with less than half the overhead of VMWare and Virtual Server today.

Potentially as interesting is the concept of containers ala Solaris 10. This lightweight virtualization could become a de jure way to build very secure application partitions within servers that are VERY tightly controlled, provide almost all the benefits of virtulization without the headache of managing virtualized hardware instances.

All in all.. this is smacking of back to the future... very sophisticated x86/64 meshed systems lashed together with super highspeed interconnects, virtualized system images at the core that can scale to massive number of processors and nodes... hmmm.. sounds like alot like the recipe for an open ended mainframe architecture. AMD is leading the charge here with Intel playing catch up. Things are certainly getting interesting again in the hardware realm!

Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:02 PM by Bellesarius

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