Skip to main content

Virtualization: Citrix, VMware plan to join Microsoft's Validation Program

As part of news announced last week regarding its virtualization-enabled Windows Server 2008 and its new standalone Hyper-V Server software, Microsoft also unveiled its Server Virtualization Validation Program.

The program, which will become available next June, is intended to help companies using Windows Server in conjunction with third-party server virtualization platforms get support if technical problems arise, according to a posting late last week on Microsoft's official Windows Server division blog.

The program allows companies such as VMware Inc., or Xen provider Citrix Systems Inc. "to self-test and validate a specific virtualization stack (hardware + hypervisor) to provide customers out-of-the-box support for Windows guest OSes," Alessandro Perilli, an Italy-based consultant, wrote on his Virtualization.Info blog.

Previously, Microsoft would only try to support Windows Server users using non-Microsoft virtualization if they paid for pricey Premier Support, according to Frank Artale, vice president of business development at Citrix, who confirmed the vendor's plans to join the program.


Here's the Malaysian CW carrying the news.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

OS Virtualization comparison: Parallels' Virtuozzo vs the rest

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...