Blog: Pete Loshin

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More Free and Open Virtualization News

If you haven't read my article, A Virtualization Primer, go read it; if you have, read it again. And then go read these articles about the latest virtualization news.

First off, VMware took the next step in turning their standard for virtualization into the industry standard for virtualization. Monday's announcement, VMware Introduces Open Virtual Machine Disk Format Specification , speaks directly to the need for a strong move toward openness. VMware stated "its virtual machine disk format specification for defining and formatting virtual machine environments is now openly available, downloadable and free of charge. This will enable use by all developers, software vendors and projects and includes open licensing compatible with those operating under open source licenses such as the GPL. In addition, VMware is committed to supporting any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by customers and working toward converging on open standards in this area."

It's nice to see a company that "gets it". In other news on Monday, Microsoft showed that they don't quite exactly "get it": Market Bulletin: Microsoft Announces New Price, and Availability of Linux Support, for Virtual Server 2005 R2.

The gist of the announcement is that the new price for Virtual Server 2005 R2 is $0.00. In other words, you can download it for free (though the software is still proprietary and still subject to restrictive Microsoft licensing terms). More interesting, though, is news that Microsoft will now officially support nine different Linux distributions! Count 'em: SUSE and Red Hat. That's right, NINE! Five different releases of Red Hat, and four versions of Novell's SUSE Linux.

Further muddying the waters is maneuvering by Microsoft and newcomver XenSource to flank VMware. This article in the Register, Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux spells out how XenSource, in a move that may prove either brilliant or disastrous, is aligning itself with Microsoft by licensing Microsoft's VHD, or Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification. Microsoft hasn't offered VHD to VMware, which may have prompted VMware to actually release their own Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK), without licensing restrictions.

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