Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that the first public beta of Windows Server virtualization software, code-named Viridian, will be available in the second half of this year, not the first half, as previously disclosed.
The announcement was made on the blog of Mike Neil, general manager for virtualization strategy at Microsoft. Neil attributed the delay to Microsoft's efforts to improve performance and scalability. For instance, Neil said Windows Server virtualization will be able to support up to 64 processors, which he said is more than any other competing product.
The hypervisor software is still scheduled to be available within 180 days of the release of Windows Server "Longhorn," which is also expected in the second half of the year.
Microsoft also expects to ship a third beta of Longhorn before the middle of this year.
Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft's existing virtualization hypervisor product, was also pushed back slightly. It will now arrive by the end of the second quarter, rather than in the first quarter. In the meantime, a Release Candidate will be available for customers and partners to download by the end of this month.
Virtual Server 2005, like market leader VMWare Inc.'s hypervisor products, runs on top of the operating system to create virtual machines. It does not offer performance that is as fast as hypervisors such as Windows Server virtualization, which sits between the hardware and operating system layers.
Neil said the latest SP1 will support virtual machines from three additional operating systems: SUSLinux Enterprise Server 10, Solaris 10 and the recent CTP build of Windows Server "Longhorn." Neil said that the product has gotten 15,000 downloads of the Linux add-ins for Virtual Server 2005 R2, which he said "indicates strong interest to consolidate Linux workloads on Windows Server."
SP1's other enhancements include up to 64 virtual machines on 32-bit Windows Server hosts, 512 virtual machines on x64 Windows Server hosts on systems with more memory -- up to 256GB -- and more cores. The product also adds support for hardware-assisted virtualization in the form of Intel VT and AMD-V.
Microsoft also said that its free Virtual PC 2007 software has been downloaded 1 million times in its first 38 days of official release.
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