stuart test blog

Big news this week was that Microsoft have had to drop postpone some key features from their new virtualisation software currently in development. Mike Neill, GM of virtualisation strategy went on the defensive with a lengthy blog post detailing all of the cool things about Microsoft’s new virtualisation platform, codenamed Viridian. But if you kept reading through the whole post, you would have noticed the small section at the bottom where he mentions the features that are being dropped:

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 always enjoy watching my feeds through Google Reader when Microsoft drops some big news. I subscribe to the TechNet blogs feed so I always get to the skewed point of view from there. For example, when a new product is released you’ll see lots of “cool”, “new”, “!!!”, etc, but when some bad news is released you’ll see all the Microsofties go on the defensive with somber posts explaining that “shipping is a feature” or playing down the news. Then you compare that with the feeds from the rest of the blogosphere and you get the opposite reactions.

Personally, I don’t have much opinion on the Virtualisation news – I think VMware’s ESX server and Virtual Infrastructure will rule the enterprise space for the foreseeable future. By the time that Microsoft have released their v.1 product, VMware will probably be on v.4 with an already established userbase.