I’ve always been one who has wanted his cake and be able to eat it too. I’ve struggled with virtualiztion in the past (Virtual PC on Windows, qemu on Linux), mostly because of performance. With multi-core processors and hardware assisted virtualization, I look forward to being able to run all my favorite operating systems side-by-side. XP because it’s “stable,” Vista because it’s what’s coming, and various Linux distros and other *nix’s (FC6 & FreeBSD are my favorites). And in the “because I’d like to try” category, I hope that it will be possible to coerce Mac OSX to run happily in virtualization. I’ve heard rumors of getting it to run on a plain x86 machine, and thus hope to convince OSX that the virtual machines is one such device.
I’ve taken an introductory look at the Longhorn beta and one of the things that I am most excited about is it’s built-in Virtualization, which will only be available in the x64 editions. With the advent of Intel’s VT technology and AMD’s “Pacifica” hardware assisted virualization features, virtualizatition on comodity hardware is going to be big. Virtual Server 2005 R2 is able to take advantage of these features now, and is a free download from Microsoft.
Some other things to look forward to with Virtualization are:
Live migration – move running virtual servers from one Virtual Server to another, running Client OS such as Windows XP on Virtual Server, support for Linux, and Legacy App migration with the “P2V” (physical-to-virtual) tool.
