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Re: Virtualisation Gives Linux an Edge Over Windows

On Feb 19, 4:45 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Virtualization: Linux's killer app
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Think about it. Even Microsoft supports running Linux on its Virtual
> | Server product. Why would it do that? Wouldn't an OS partitioning
> | technology, such as that used by OpenVz or Sun Solaris, be more in
> | keeping with the kind of homogeneous environments that Microsoft
> | would like to see? Why would Microsoft invest its resources to
> | support a virtual machine technology that can only open the
> | door to Linux in the datacenter?
> `----
> http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/19/08OPopenent_1.html
>
> Microsoft intends to use Novell to flip things over and Ron Hovsepian pretty
> much agreed to this. He said this in an old interview.

One of the big barriers to the adoption of Vista will ultimately be
it's hostility to virtualization.  Ironically, Microsoft may even find
a whole new market for something based on Windows 9x or Windows NT
4.0.  Microsoft may be able to license versions of "Windows for WINE"
as well.  Most of these could be sold for prices similar to the price
of OEM copies of Windows.  Too high a price and Microsoft might cut
itself out of the market entirely.

Keep in mind that in 1998, nearly 90% of the applications were created
exclusively for Windows.  Although Java existed, most Microsoft
programmers used J++ and ignorantly called ActiveX controls and COM
objects into their applications.

By 2001, corporate customers were rather annoyed with Microsoft's
"upgrade or die" tactics, and began a strategy of purchasing only
multiplatform technologies.  At this point, most corporate software
written since 2001 has been written using either Java-2 which really
is "write once run anywhere" and tested with Linux as well as
Windows.  Compiled applications have been more focused on portable
APIs and often put virtualized Linux on Windows in the form of Cygwin.

Microsoft's top management is very aware that Linux growth has
outpaced Microsoft's growth for almost 10 years now, and Linux
deployments now exceeds new Windows deployments (since most Windows
deployments are replacements of existing Windows systems).  The bigger
problem for Microsoft is that Linux has taken the lead in the 64 bit
and dual-core deployment strategy.  AMD-64 and EMT-64 chips run at
incredible speeds under Linux, and barely chug along at the same speed
as slower Pentium III and Pentium IV servers.  The Windows
applications are so dependent on sychronization with the Video and
hard drives, that the faster speeds don't really translate to higher
productivity.

Linux on the other hand has reached the point where it can fully
exploit the capabilities of AMD-64 and EMT-64 single-core and dual-
core processors, and uses memory so efficiently that the hard drive
does not become a limiting factor.

Since the first concept of Windows NT, back in 1992, the key motto has
been "MIPS are cheap, RAM is cheap, Disk is cheap - use as much as you
can".  This was fine when you were actually trying to hog as many of
the machine's resources with your operating systems, applications, and
libraries, as you possibly code for the purpose of excluding
competitors who are not paying you royalties.

With Virtualization, Microsoft has hit a new roadblock.  Linux uses
nearly all of it's unused RAM, the fast physical memory, as disk
buffers, maintaining a small free pool of about 10%.  The result is
that VMs need to be as small as possible, and let the master operating
system manage and optimize the drives and peripherals.

One of the strange things to observe, is that Windows virtual machine
actually run faster, as clients of Linux, than they run when running
directly on the hardware.





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