Virtual Server MMS Announcement (2 of 2) - Vision and Strategy of Virtual Computing Environments

The second of my blog entries about the MMS announcements made only minutes ago by Steve Ballmer relate to the longer term strategy for Virtualisation within Microsoft. You can see my commentary highlighting the shorter term vision for Virtual Server here. In his keynote address, Steve announced increased investments in support of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, specifically in the area of virtualization.

Starting in the "Longhorn" timeframe (the next version of Windows) virtualisation capabilities will be built directly into the OS through "hypervisor" technology. This new hypervisor technology is going to support hardware virtualisation technologies such as Intels VT and AMDs Pacifica. Longhorn should be with us as a shipping product some time in 2007.

Management of virtualisation is also going to see a significant boost as the "System Center" product family will be optimised to provide really comprehensive virtualization management capabilities.

These are exciting times. If you want to know more about todays announcments, please join my Virtual Server webcast on 29th April at 2PM GMT. Here's the registration link.

To read the official press release from todays MMS keynote, click here.
https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/Apr05/04-20VirtualizationInvestmentsPR.asp