Microsoft Virtual Server was a virtualization solution that facilitated the creation of

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hard ...

on the

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...

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 becam ...

, it was acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

prior to release.

Virtual PC Windows Virtual PC (successor to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, and Connectix Virtual PC) is a Hardware virtualization, virtualization program for Microsoft Windows. In July 2006, Microsoft released the Windows version f ...

is Microsoft's related desktop virtualization software package.

Virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

s are created and managed through a Web-based interface that relies on

Internet Information Services Internet Information Services (IIS-pronounced 2S, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NN ...

(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, w ...

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 mo ...

host operating system support, the ability to mount virtual hard drives on the host machine and additional operating systems support, including

. It also provides a Volume Shadow Copy writer that enables live backups of the Guest OS on a

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 is the fourth release of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of the operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and generally to retail on F ...

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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...

versions 2.1-5.0,

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta rele ...

9.0, SUSE Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versions 9 and 10. Virtual Server has been discontinued and replaced by

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded W ...

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 VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

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 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 ...

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.

References

External links

Benchmarking Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

Benchmarking VMware ESX Server 2.5 vs Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition

HyperAdmin: Microsoft Virtual Server Management

Microsoft Server Virtualization for government agencies

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit Book

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System requirements for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
{{Virtualization products Virtualization software Microsoft server technology, Virtual Server

Differences from Virtual PC

Version history

Limitations

See also

References

External links