* Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005
Solaris 10 heads for Linux territory
Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005
By Tom Henderson
In our Clear Choice Test, Virtual Server 2005 – technology Microsoft picked up with its 2003 Connectix purchase – proved itself well worth the money ($495 for a host with up to four CPUs) because it lets you run multiple instances of Windows (NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 on up to 2003) on the same machine. And with the Virtual Server Migration Kit, it provides a way to gracefully move and consolidate older Windows NT and 2000 Server applications onto new (and ostensibly higher-capacity) hardware. The migration kit also helps resolve Windows-specific hardware issues, such as migrating a Windows 2000 server running on an ancient SCSI host bus adapter to new storage subsystems inside the host machine with very little modification.
VMware (recently acquired by EMC) has long offered server virtualization with its ESX and GSX Server wares for a variety of operating systems. Virtual Server 2005 is not as elegant as VMware’s software and only officially supports Windows servers.
For the full test results, please go to:
