Microsoft to Castrate First-Gen Viridian

By Angela Natividad | Published May 11. 2007

Time can be a severe dictator. To keep on-schedule for a promised virtualization technology release, Microsoft announced Thursday that it plans to pull features out of its "Viridian" hypervisor to keep on schedule.

This news comes after a previous delay in which the launch date for the beta, scheduled for the first half of 2007, was moved to the second half.

Hypervisor technology, also known as virtualization managers, enable clients to manage multiple operating systems, or multiple instances of the same OS, on one computer system. The hypervisor itself takes care of the system's memory, processor and other resources, designating as-needed what each system requires.

The mysteriously dubbed "Viridian" hypervisor, formally Windows Server Virtualization, was slated to appear 180 days after Vista's introduction to the market. Three expected features have been removed, including:

Live migration. This lets users run a virtual machine from one physical server to another.

Support for hot-adds, or on-the-fly memory, storage, processor or network card adds.

Computers with over 16 processing cores. If you've got more than 16 processing cores (i.e. eight dual-core chips or four quad-core chips) in your computer, don't sign up for this first-gen release.

The 16-core ceiling may ring a bit lame but the vast majority of x86 servers don't exceed that limit anyway. And new Intel and Advanced Micro Devices quad-core chips for servers will make 16-core servers a practical, even preferable option.

Viridian lacks live migration support, making it handy for the early virtualization stages in which servers can be consolidated into a more efficient number. Unfortunately, this also means it will lack the capacity to support a more sophisticated virtual-computing environment in which computers can swap tasks to account for changing work priorities or bad hardware.

The newly limited scope of Viridian allots more stretching space for Microsoft's other projects in-the-make. In the meantime, Xen has a number of capabilities Viridian does not, including live migration support. It merits a look-see if you're tired of all the waffling.