Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft did its bit for the Chinese government publicity tour to the USA by once again publicizing its OEM deal with Lenovo even though the details for the upcoming year haven’t really been worked out yet. The nominal figure is reputed to be “as much as” $1.3B which would be up slightly from last year’s $1.2B and, of course, it includes other markets besides China. The upside for Microsoft, besides helping out a pal, is that the mutual backscratching with the Chinese government keeps them focused on piracy reduction.

Mary Jo Foley was spelunking the WinHEC07 press site and discovered the use of Windows Server 2008 for Windows Server “Longhorn” materials. Barring any last minute “magic” from Microsoft’s Keystone Cops marketing mavens it seems like a lock. While hardly poetic, the name does suggest no nonsense solidity which is all to the good for a server OS.

Today Microsoft promised that a beta of Viridian, the free Windows Server virtualization facility accompanying Windows Longhorn Server, will be available when Longhorn is released to manufacturing. Unfortunately however, along the way to making the recently delayed promised release of Viridian within 180 days of Longhorn, some features had to be cut. Mike Neil, Microsoft’s GM of virtualization strategy, has the details at the Windows Server Division Weblog:

So we are making the following changes, and postponing these features to a future release of Windows Server virtualization:

• No Live migration
• No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor)
• Support limit of 16 cores/logical processors (e.g., 2 processor, quad-core systems is 8 cores; or 4 processor, quad-core system is 16 cores)

I wanted to share this information this week with partners and customers so that no one is surprised at WinHEC when we demo all the other innovations in Windows Server virtualization.

I doubt that the lack of these features is a catastrophe, but the delay of previously promised features makes Viridian seem a less than top rank offering. Moreover, while it will still be usable for garden variety server consolidation, the lack of live migration means that Viridian cannot be used for state of the art workload switching configurations as can offerings from competitors VMware and XenSource.