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Launched in February and slated for a July launch, the beta of Microsoft's Virtual Server is available for test and development purposes. Our tests indicated that the launch version should suit companies planning to consolidate server hardware, providing their IT infrastructure is largely based on Microsoft platforms.
The software is designed to run on Windows Server 2003, Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter editions, and the virtual machines (VMs) it provides can be used to run a selection of Microsoft operating systems - Windows 98, NT4, 2000 Server, Advanced Server, XP, and some of the Windows 2003 Server family. In IT Week tests we also ran other operating systems, but Microsoft does not officially support this.
To access a VM's desktop graphical user interface (GUI), a client system needs to run Internet Explorer 5.5 or later and have an ActiveX control installed.
We reviewed Virtual Server 2004 (VS) on a variety of systems, including laptops, desktops and servers. The install was simple and the system was running in under 10 minutes. IT managers should note that since our tests, Microsoft has renamed the software as Virtual Server 2005, and it is this edition that is now available for download.
Configuring VMs and the VS software is done from a web-based management console. The master screen has options for configuring VMs, virtual disks, virtual networking and so on. Creating a VM was simple and involved setting up a virtual hard disk and the network adapter it would use. The hard disks can be up to 127GB in size, and a variety of read/write characteristics are available, so changes to a VM's disk can be kept or discarded when it is power-cycled.
A VM's network interface card (NIC) can be configured to access an internal, virtual network, or the LAN. We set up an internal network with a DHCP server and configured our VMs to connect only to this, providing a virtual network demilitarised zone (DMZ). We had previously configured VMs to access a standard Ethernet LAN, and could access files on a mapped network drive. We used Microsoft's loopback NIC and standard file-sharing protocols to move data between host and VM file systems.
We created a variety of VMs with no problems, including Windows NT Server, Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 Workstation and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0. We checked the performance of a host and guest Windows Server 2003 by timing the encryption of a large file using Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) 1.2.4.
The guest operating system was about 30 percent slower than the host. Given that virtualisation systems must operate with some overhead, and that this was beta software, the result seems quite reasonable.
Since VS runs as a service, it loads and runs before the user has logged on. Up to 3.6GB of RAM per virtual machine is supported, up to the limit of the host operating system.
Price: free beta download
Contact: Microsoft 0870 60 10 100
See also:
How virtualisation technology can dramatically improve return on hardware investment 14 Sep 2004
Server virtualisation puts huge demands on storage - no wonder EMC is keen to promote it 22 Jan 2004Server virtualisation technology promises to bring a wide range of benefits to IT buyers 22 Sep 2003All Operating Systems
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