Microsoft Hypes up Hyper-V
With Windows 7 on the horizon, Microsoft has wowed its fans, and heard some pre-release grumbles from its detractors, but they’ve not really talked about the server-side of the coin.
Microsoft big-wigs have promised that Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology will come up with the goods, after the media tore the company’s promises to pieces over the last few months.
Bill Laing is the corporate VP of Microsoft Windows server and solutions division. He said at a recent conference, the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in LA, that the planned management features would be the “competitive differentiator” in the upcoming version of Hyper-V, which is due with Windows Server 2008 R2. Laing demonstrated Hyper-V performing a live migration, playing a video while switching hypervisors.
The next version of Microsoft’s SQL Server database, Kilimanjaro, promises greater scalability and improved management in large environments that the current SQL Server 2008.
The SQL Server RDBMS engine will be changed in Kilimanjaro so that it can run up to 256 logical processors, going beyond the limit of 64, and eliminating the need to manually partition applications across nodes. This allows customers to run high scale and particularly difficult applications.
Microsoft is “lighting up” new technologies, according to Quentin Clark, general manager for the SQL Server database engine. He says this will allow, for example, Excel to work with larger data sets than currently possible. “We are aligning it with more Office experience…to complete the last mile of business intelligence,” Clark said.
Last month Microsoft announced the arrival of Madison, a server-based appliance based on Kilimanjaro with hardware partners for large scale and detailed analysis.
The company plans to reference implementations ahead of Madison and announced that it might expand into other area as there has already been interest. This could mean appliances for packaged apps, like SAP, or the much more difficult, ‘custom old transaction processing’ (COTP).
COTP could be hard to achieve because reference architectures tend to require knowledge of I/O, memory and CPU capabilities in addition to knowing the software’s own limits.
Leave a Comment