Well we all have good input on flexibility and current expansion capabilities, but how about the concern for licensing someone posed earlier?

 

I see no issue that would cause a complete budget drain, but are there any major concerns for any annual licensing agreements.  Software assurance, or Volume licensing concerns with Longhorn and scvmm?

 

 

 

 

With Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 on top of Windows server enterprise edition, you can install up to 4 VMs for free and with DataCenter edition, there is no limit.  Your hardware is the limitation there.

Although MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 does a good job but the product is still at its infancy meaning that to get more robust features one must look elsewhere at least for now; upgrading path maybe a challenge if you are looking at expanding your network environment.

 

Firm.

 

I have installed redhat 5 on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the only issue I had was tweaking xorg.conf and the video drivers to get X to work but text based install and CLI worked fine.

 

I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head but I believe if you run Win Datacenter edition you are entitled to run X copies of windows VM’s on it for free (I want to say 5?).  I also believe the same is true with Enterprise edition, however the number is less. 

 

 

 

Licensing is not that bad of an issue for Higher Ed, but the question is the features and how they have improved networking, clustering and support improvement for the other non windows operating systems. 

 

Virtual Machine based portals have been free for us for a number of years, but if MS is talking enterprise class VM we would have to examine what licensing would cover or be for. 

 

In the end if you don’t have a cal or valid product key for your current Microsoft based VMs and Microsoft Software on them you (not you specifically; people in general) really are not going to see the difference.   if all you utilize is Linux pre-compiled builds nothing changes.

 

 

 

 

 

My concern about Microsoft’s Virtual Server offering is that Microsoft is currently becoming rather heavy handed in trying to get users to subscribe to their annual license model.  I would hate to be locked into one of their Virtual Server systems and find that it became a leverage to move me towards an annual license fee.  I am currently testing VMWare’s offerings and like the fact that I can integrate Linux into the mix with relative ease, including pre-built linux VM’s.

 

 

Nag-

 

I watched about an hour long recorded webcast by Microsoft on the up and coming SCVMM part of the System Center family and my first impressions are… WOW!  It is currently RTM and should be out soon…and paired with the updates coming when Windows Server 2008 is released…and then again 120 days after that with the full update to Virtual Server it seems very nice.  We are beginning to think about starting to work towards a production class Virtual environment…currently we use VS2005 for testing but it’s not redundant enough for production with only one server.

 

I wonder if any of you other MS guys/gals out there have heard about this (if not then you should check it out) and or messed with it at all and am interested to hear some of your impressions.

 

/Ehren

 

Ehren J. Benson, MCSE

Windows Systems Administrator

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Michigan State University

1209 A Biomed Phys Sci

 

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