LAS VEGAS – Microsoft said Wednesday that for the first time it would add Linux support to one of its products, citing the need for providing users with the means to manage a heterogeneous network environment.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, made the announcement as part of his keynote address at the company’s annual Microsoft Management Summit. Ballmer said the Linux support would come in Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1, which is due to ship by the end of the year.
“We will add support for non-Windows virtual machines running on our Virtual Server, including Linux,” Ballmer said. “Virtualization is an area of intense interest and activity for us. Driving virtualization is a key technology to facilitate better compatibility and lower total cost of ownership.” He called virtualization a major area of investment for Microsoft but did provide a dollar amount.
Ballmer also used his keynote to emphasize Microsoft is planning to ride its Dynamic Systems Initiative into becoming an “enterprise management vendor” and to deliver tools that will let users extract management intelligence from their network nodes regardless of vendor in order to make better decisions and lower the cost of operating a network.
He also joked about his “no-show” at last year’s Management Summit, when he had to cancel his keynote after being called away to meet with the European Union, which eventually fined the company $613 million.
But the emphasis was on Virtual Server 2005, first introduced late last year. Ballmer said the server would support third-party operating systems running on top of Virtual Server when Service Pack 1 is released, which is slated for the end of the year. Previously, users could run other operating systems within Virtual Server 2005, but Microsoft did not provide support for the configuration.
Ballmer also said Microsoft was adding other virtualization improvements with Service Pack 1, including support for x64 editions of Windows Server 2003 as a host operating system, and a Microsoft Operations Manager management pack for Virtual Server that provides a central console. Microsoft plans to license, royalty-free, its Virtual Hard Disk (.vhd) file format in an effort to jump start industry acceptance of its virtualization technology.
“They can’t compete against VMware without support for other operating systems,” said Nelson Ruest, a consultant with Resolutions Enterprises in Victoria, British Columbia. EMC’s VMware subsidiary is the competition that Microsoft is gunning for. Ruest said Microsoft is taking the right steps because most users view Virtual Server today as a platform for non-mission-critical tasks such as test environments. He also said VMware has a superior management console that Microsoft will have to work hard to match.
Ballmer said Microsoft would add other critical features around the time the company releases Longhorn Server in 2007, but said those features will not come with Longhorn.
Most important will be support for Hypervisor, an optimized OS, or microkernel, built into the virtualization platform that provides better performance and scalability. Experts say Hypervisor is key for virtualization because it shields the host operating system from security attacks. Virtualization vendors VMware and SW-Soft both support Hypervisor.
Microsoft’s Hypervisor technology will support hardware from Intel and AMD, and Ballmer said Microsoft would develop management products for virtualization technology under its System Center portfolio of software.
Ballmer also made other announcements that he said supported the company’s commitment to provide a management platform for corporate networks built around System Management Server, Microsoft Operations Manager and System Center tools it is introducing, such as the recently announced Reporting Manager and Data Protection Manager.
Ballmer said the forthcoming release of Windows Server, code-named R2, would provide support for WS-Management, a Web services protocol the company is working on with Sun, AMD, Dell, BMC and others. He said the protocol would support interoperability, and he showed a demo using Microsoft Operations Manager to troubleshoot problems on Sun servers, one running the Windows OS and the other Solaris.
“We are showing you for the first time ever the use of XML and WS-Management to get stronger interoperability from a management perspective,” said Ballmer. He said the work would be part of a “State of the Union” announcement he and Sun CEO Scott McNealy will make in a few weeks regarding last year’s historic agreement the companies made to work together.
Ballmer said Windows Server R2 also would include improvements in Unix interoperability and identity federation with Active Directory Federation Services.
In addition, Ballmer said Microsoft would support an emerging standard for compliance checking that will be included with its Network Access Protection (NAP) technology, a set of technologies for evaluating desktop computers for security compliance before letting them on the network NAP is expected to ship with Longhorn.
The specification being developed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is called Trusted Network Connect, a specification for use in multi-vendor environments for compliance checks for virus and patch updates.
Last October, Microsoft and Cisco said they would work together to develop interoperability between their respective technologies so that users could mix and match components into a single platform. The two also said they would help drive adoption of industry standards, although they did not mention one in particular. Cisco is not a member of the Trusted Computing Group.
