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Microsoft lives in a multi processor fantasy land
Microsoft today spilled the beans on its failure to build a competitive virtualization product on schedule, forcing the vendor to delay the beta release of its Viridian virtualization technology.
Viridian will be one of the major features of its upcoming Windows "Longhorn" Server product (although it will only be released up to 180 days after the official Lonhorn launch).
Users however are likely to use virtualization to move multiple smaller servers onto a single, larger box (aka: server consolidation). To really profit there, you need to be able to run Windows Server on really big servers with numerous processors. Traditionally that hasn't been Microsoft's strongest feature.
Early tests indicated that Viridian did poorly on multi processor, Mike Neil, general manager for Microsoft's virtualization strategy wrote on a company blog. Thus a delay was required.
But that isn't bad, he stresses. "We’re designing Windows Server
virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I'm proud to say is
something no other vendor’s product supports" (emphasis by me). Bear in mind that the
current Windows Server 2003 already supports up to 64 processors. Neil
is strictly referring to Viridian's performance issues - not those of Longhorn server.
True, VMWare only supports up to 16 CPUs. But Novell's SLES 10 with Xen support for instance has been tested to run on as many as 1024 CPUs and is actively deployed on systems with 512 processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (also with Xen) advertises an "unlimited" number of processors.
Solaris 10 has been supporting virtualization for several years now. The largest box that it runs on is Sun's E25K featuring 72 dual core processors. It will run on bigger boxes, it's just that Sun isn't making any bigger ones at this point.
Microsoft is finding out that building scalable systems is hard to do. But just because Microsoft is running into those walls today, doesn't mean that the rest of the industry hasn't already solved those problems years ago.
April 12, 2007 at 10:59 PM | Permalink
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