By
Antone Gonsalves
21 September 2007 01:33PM
Tags:
microsoft | ship | release | candidate | windows | server | 2008 | next | week
Michael Neil, general manager of virtualisation for Microsoft, disclosed the plans while demonstrating the software's virtualisation capabilities at the Intel Developer Forum.
Microsoft on Thursday said the release candidate of Windows Server 2008 would ship next week.
Michael Neil, general manager of virtualisation for Microsoft, disclosed the plans while demonstrating the software's virtualisation capabilities at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. A release candidate is typically almost identical to the final release. Windows Server 2008, currently in Beta 3 and feature complete, is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2008.
In late August, Microsoft pushed back the release date from the end of this year, saying the operating system needed a "little more time to bake." The company did not provide details.
During a keynote by Renee James, VP for Intel's software group, Neil demonstrated Windows Server's virtualisation technology, Viridian. Neil showed Viridian running Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Edition on Windows Server.
Novell and Microsoft are partners in building interoperability between the two operating systems.
Microsoft's approach to virtualisation has Windows as the platform for running different OSes to consolidate more business applications on a single computer server. Rival VMware takes an approach in which a hypervisor that runs directly on top of the processor is the platform for running multiple OSes.
Neil said Windows Server would contain application programming interfaces based on standards developed by the Distributed Management Task Force. The DMTF is an organisation that develops and maintains standards for system management of IT environments. Participants in DMTF's efforts in developing standards for plugging management tools into virtualisation environments include VMware, XenSource, which Citrix plans to acquire this year; Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others.
Microsoft launched this month System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, which provides centralised deployment and management of virtual machines, which connect operating systems to the hypervisor or host OS. In addition, System Center enables IT managers to convert VMware offerings to a Microsoft-compatible format.
See original article on InformationWeek.com