WinHEC Virtualisation Demo

Had this come through my mail - though you might be interested!

During the keynote at WinHEC we demonstrated Windows Server virtualization (hypervisor) for the first time publically.

Some of the key features we demonstrated:

* 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 said 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 (no that’s not a misprint) 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:

1. Uni-proc Windows Server 2003 Standard x86

2. Uni-proc Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

3. Dual-proc Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition

4. Quad-proc Longhorn Server x64 Edition (Beta 2)