It has been revealed that in Microsoft’s new release of their Virtual Server 2005 product, they will support Linux running as a virtual machine for the first time.
Virtualisation software, such as MS Virtual Server, VMware and Xen allows multiple ‘guest’ virtual computers to run on one physical machine. It’s useful for testing new software on multiple platforms and for spreading the load on overstreched servers.
It’s been almost traditional that Microsoft’s Virtual Server product only fully supported Windows as a guest operating system for Virtual Server, but it seems they are about to change that. This is probably a response to the growing dominance of VMware, which works on Windows and Linux physical machines and hosts both Windows and Linux ‘guests’. VMware also released a beta of a free version of their server product, for Windows and Linux which can be downloaded here.
Microsoft also announced that Virtual Server will be built into their next server operating system, currently still codenamed Windows Longhorn Server (but will probably be called Windows Server 2007). This is also to rival VMware’s free product.
This news comes just as the open source Xen virtualisation software is branching out to run on Windows platforms, as it currently only works on Linux (but is already built into SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
[...] Also, recently, a new product in the virtualisation arena has appeared – Parallels. Parallels Desktop is exclusively for Intel Macs, but it allows you to run Windows or Linux alongside Mac OS X on your Intel Mac. Parallels is currently not available as a free fully-functioning download (there’s only a trial version). Parallels beat all the other virtualisation products for the Mac to the market (on Intel). Previously, Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac was the dominant product (however this only works well with older PowerPC Macs). VMware Server is available for Intel-based Windows and Linux host machines and you can run both Windows and Linux (regardless of your host machine’s OS) alongside your physical machine. Virtual PC runs on Windows only, but now allows Windows and Linux to run as virtual machines (the operating systems you run inside Virtual PC’s virtual bubble). [...]