Annonce de la feuille de route sur la virtualisation...

Lors de la conférence WinHEC, Bill Gates a fait une annonce majeure concernant la stratégie de Virtualisation sur Windows. Cette annonce a été illustrée par une démonstration du futur produit.

Il s'agissait de la première démonstration public du produit Windows Server virtualization (nom de code Viridian).

Voici les principaux points mis en évidence par la démonstration :

New Longhorn Server MMC UI. Windows Server virtualization takes advantage of the new MMC 3.0 capabilities to provide an elegant Windows Server experience. (No more web interface)
x64 virtual machine support. Windows Server virtualization provides 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) virtual machines to provide support for workloads with large memory requirements. We also publicly disclosed that Windows Server virtualization virtual machines will support more than 32 GB of memory per virtual machine.
SMP virtual machines support. Windows Server virtualization provides up to 8-way virtual machines.
Hot-add virtual network adapter support. Windows Server virtualization provides support for the hot-add of virtual NICs into a virtual machine. In the demo, we showed a dual-processor x64 virtual machine running Windows Server 2003 that had no network adapters and we hot-added a NIC while the vm was running. The NIC appeared almost instantly.
Hot-add memory support. Windows Server virtualization provides support for the hot-add of memory into a virtual machine. In the demo, we showed a quad-processor x64 virtual machine running Longhorn Server with 4 GBs of memory and we hot-added an additional 1 GB of memory taking the virtual machine to 5 GB of memory while the vm was running. The memory appeared instantly in Task Manager.

For those interested, we demonstrated the following virtual machines running concurrently on the same system: