Microsoft Virtual Server was a virtualization solution that facilitated the creation of
virtual machines on the
Windows XP,
Windows Vista and
Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Originally developed by
Connectix
Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became ...
, it was acquired by
Microsoft prior to release.
Virtual PC is Microsoft's related desktop virtualization software package.
Virtual machines are created and managed through a Web-based interface that relies on
Internet Information Services (IIS) or through a Windows client application tool called VMRCplus.
The last version using this name was Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. New features in R2 SP1 include
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
guest operating system support, Virtual Disk Precompactor,
SMP (but not for the guest OS),
x64
x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...
host operating system support, the ability to mount virtual hard drives on the host machine and additional operating systems support, including
Windows Vista. It also provides a Volume Shadow Copy writer that enables live backups of the Guest OS on a
Windows Server 2003 or
Windows Server 2008 host. A utility to mount
VHD images has also been included since SP1. Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are available as a free download. Officially supported Linux guest operating systems include
Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 2.1-5.0,
Red Hat Linux 9.0,
SUSE Linux and
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versions 9 and 10.
Virtual Server has been discontinued and replaced by
Hyper-V.
Differences from Virtual PC
* VPC has multimedia support and Virtual Server does not (e.g. no sound driver support).
* VPC uses a single thread whereas Virtual Server is multi-threaded.
* VPC will install on Windows 7, but Virtual Server is restricted from install on NT 6.1 or higher operating systems i.e. Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
* VPC is limited to 127GB .vhd (per IDE CHS specification), however Virtual Server can be made to access .vhd up to 2048GB (NTFS max file size).
Version history
Microsoft acquired an unreleased Virtual Server from Connectix in February 2003.
The initial release of Microsoft's Virtual Server, general availability, was announced on September 13, 2004. Virtual Server 2005 was available in two editions: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard edition was limited to a maximum 4 processors for the host operating system while the Enterprise edition was not.
On 2006-04-03, Microsoft made Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition a free download,
in order to better compete with the free virtualization offerings from
VMware and
Xen, and discontinued the Standard Edition. Microsoft Virtual Server R2 SP1 added support for both Intel VT (IVT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V).
Limitations
Known limitations of Virtual Server, , include the following:
* Will not install on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 or newer operating systems. Upgrades from Vista/Server2008 can be patched.
* Although Virtual Server 2005 R2 can run on hosts with
x86-64 processors, it cannot run x64 guests that require x86-64 processors (guests cannot be 64-bit).
* It also makes use of
SMP, but does not virtualize it (it does not allow guests to use more than 1 CPU each).
* Performance may suffer due to the way the instruction set is virtualized in this platform, with very limited direct interaction with the host hardware.
See also
*
Virtual appliance
*
Virtual disk image
*
x86 virtualization
x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU.
In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware-a ...
References
External links
Benchmarking Microsoft Virtual Server 2005Benchmarking VMware ESX Server 2.5 vs Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise EditionHyperAdmin: Microsoft Virtual Server ManagementMicrosoft Server Virtualization for government agenciesMicrosoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit BookMicrosoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1System Center Virtual Machine ManagerSystem requirements for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
{{Virtualization products
Virtualization software
Virtual Server