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Re: [Xen-devel] Microsoft plans 'hypervisor' for Longhorn

To: "Christopher S. Aker" <caker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Microsoft plans 'hypervisor' for Longhorn
From: "M.A. Williamson" <maw48@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: 08 Jun 2005 02:21:04 +0100
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Article mentions Xen as Microsoft's competition.

The MS hypervisor is a very interesting beast from our PoV: * drivers run in a dom0-like "parent" partition (cut down Longhorn) * "child" partitions devices are plumbed through this * VMM-aware OSes can use APIs called "enlightenments" (don't you usually achieve enlightenment through practising Zen? :-D) to avoid full-virt penalties

Their roadmap includes live migration and suspend-resume, USB virtualisation, etc.

It'll be interesting to see if they require hypervisor-enabled hardware or if they pull in the binary scanning / rewriting from VirtualPC. It'll also be interesting to see just how open their "open" device / VMM interfaces are: in particular, can Linux support them as a guest, can Xen fake them out to boost performance when running Longhorn guests?

Things are evidently heating up in virtualisation land. It'll be interesting to see what VMWare's response to this is.

Cheers,
Mark

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