Redmond (WA) - Kicking off a global series of special free event summits held around the world today today, Bellevue, WA played host to Microsoft's latest virtualization product lines announcement.  Expected to reach more than 250,000 people, the upcoming availability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 were announced.  The company also handed out a package to event attendees providing the new Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 as a no-cost download.

The inaugural event summit held was streamed this morning and featured several Microsoft executives to outline Microsoft’s direction and role in virtualization. Microsoft's latest products indicate a significant investment in virtualization, both in terms of research and development as well as available products.

With virtualization efforts growing in size, scope and complexity – and more of the hardware assets available virtually through the hypervisor layer, Microsoft’s toolsets primarily hide much of that complexity.  The focus is a set of leaner, simpler and more user-friendly tools to support the creation, distribution and monitoring of virtual machines.

Microsoft's new Hyper-V Server 2008 is a hypervisor-based server virtualization product.  It "provides a simplified, reliable and optimized virtualization solution allowing customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server."  System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers to configure and deploy new machines, as well as manage them on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.

For the first time, Microsoft demonstrated a live migration whereby a virtual machine, in the middle of its normal operations, was physically moved from one physical machine to another, all without losing any data, without having to be shut down and restarted, or without anything that a remote user would notice.  

These products are currently available to thousands of Microsoft partners around the world.  Each of them will be released to the general public within 30 days, according to Microsoft.

Background:  What is virtualization?

Virtualization is the technology used to describe a computer that allows an operating system to run on a machine, but in an isolated, protected environment - one which can cooperatively allow several instances of the operating system, or several different operating systems, to all run simultaneously.  This new ability exists because of something called a hypervisor layer, which is a cooperative effort between hardware and software to monitor the state of all of the "virtual machines."  It determines, simulates and coordinating access to specific pieces of hardware, such as video, audio, hard disk, networking and other on-board physical (hard) resources.  It also allows the creation of virtual devices, such as allowing a hard disk ISO file to serve as a CDR or DVD, often with significant speedups realized.

Virtualization also allows a single machine to replace two or more machines because it can often be recognized that not all of any given machine's resources are being utilized by a particular application.  This is especially true in large server farms where if today's model of single-OS per machine were followed, every server would have to have its own physical hardware.  With virtualization, that is no longer the case.  A single set of physical hardware can now host 10 or more virtual machines, depending on how resource intensive they are.

While this ability has been possible in large mainframe systems, and even possible in regular desktop PC systems, its desirability has grown in recent years with the addition of virtualization hardware into the x86 instruction set via technology extensions from AMD and Intel, such as Pacifica and Vanderpool respectively.  While not identical in implementation, the concept for both is the same:  Allow the hardware to tell the software when operating system instances are trying to access a shared resource, and allow the software to tell the hardware which resources are shared.

While a virtualization layer adds some complexity to the physical hardware installation and, potentially, the software which will run on it, there can be a huge payoff in cost savings and increased lesser-machine utilization.  In addition, once a "virtual machine" is created (which is really just a disk file), it can be copied and "deployed" virtually time and time and time again without having to worry about reinstalling the operating system, setting up all of the hardware just right, loading all of the drivers.  Virtualization does for entire systems what Ghost has done for years for hard drives, allowing something to be copied exactly without going through the logic of having to run the installation software to achieve the same results.

A bright future

The author of this article believes very strongly that virtualization is the future of all forms of computing, even on our cell phones, MP3 players and other handheld devices.  Eventually there will be no hardware that runs natively on any machine without a virtualizing environment.  The reasons for this relate to the benefits of virtualization, as they run into all areas of computing and hardware savings.

As devices get more and more complex and we (the users) become more and more dependent upon them, simply having access to our crucial files will no longer be enough.  We'll want a backup of our whole machine should something crash on the hardware.  Without virtualization, implementing that kind of backup ability becomes very difficult.

The idea of having new devices come up, ones with bigger screens, better keyboards, faster processors, more power saving features, better wireless, or whatever else, those which can run your previously created virtualized system exactly as it is, will mean that upgrading from one system to another will be as simple as copying a file.  

Once that file is copied, everything, including information where and when the virtual machine was "shut down", is right where it was.  You could be back up and running within a few minutes minutes, even after switching to new physical pieces of hardware.