No, not that Calista
Microsoft announced today that they bought Calista. Not Calista Flockhart, the frighteningly thin actress – Calista Technologies. The press releases have some vague info about Calista’s technology doing something to “make virtualization run better”. There’s more info on the Calista website:
The Calista Virtual Desktop (CVD) platform directly addresses the two major barriers to widespread virtual desktop adoption: the quality of the user experience and the cost per desktop. CVD provides a traditional desktop quality experience, including rich media and 3D graphics, to virtual desktops. CVD also dramatically increases the number of users per virtual desktop server resulting in decreased costs and form factors; thus, CVD is well suited to multi-core CPU and virtualized server trends and today’s densely populated datacenters.
And Citrix, Too…
Along with that announcement, they announcing a closer partnership with Citrix. The Citrix thing is interesting for two reasons:
1. Microsoft’s Terminal Server / Remote Desktop product is based on the WinFrame technology they licensed from Citrix back in 1997.
2. Citrix recently bought XenSource, the leading open source virtualization platform. That puts some real pressure on VMWare, since the Xen platform has some traction in the Linux / open source server market.
Hyper-V is a bit late to the party
One thing still remaining in Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is a hypervisor, which moves the hardware emulation to run more completely beneath the operating system:
Microsoft offers some virtualization components already. But it doesn't yet offer a key layer of software, called a "hypervisor," that emulates the physical features of a computer and runs beneath an operating system. Hyper-V is expected to add that capability.(WSJ article cited above)
Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor was supposed to ship with Windows Server 2008, but it’s been delayed to the 3rd quarter:
The company plans to offer a virtualization component with its coming Windows Server 2008 operating system, which is scheduled to be delivered this quarter. But the feature, known as Hyper-V, won't be ready for six months, or sometime in the third quarter, said Larry Orecklin, general manager of Microsoft's server-infrastructure business. (WSJ article cited above)
Microsoft’s Virtualization Strategy: The Historical Perspective
Microsoft’s had a history of buying a lot of Virtualization technologies recently:
· They bought Softricity back in 2006. Softricity’s technologies included an application streaming technology (for delivering applications on demand) as well as an application virtualization technology that runs apps in a sandbox. I’ve been hoping they’d do more with application virtualization, but everything I’ve seen so far indicates that they’re abandoning that technology except for its use in application streaming.
· Microsoft acquired Virtual PC from Connectix back in 2003.
Our Virtual Future
Jeff and I have had a running debate on the future of virtualization technologies. While I think it’d be foolish to say that VM’s aren’t growing in importance, I’m looking forward to something that provides a better integration than the “install everything in segregated VM’s” way of doing things. While the hardware and software increasing the performance of virtualized solutions, the end result isn’t significantly better. Instead having all my applications living in a separate but connected environment (like cities in the same country, sharing a common infrastructure), VM-land is more of a nuclear option approach which banishes and segregates all our applications and data to separate planets. To my way of thinking above technologies don’t fundamentally change any of that – each virtual machine may run faster, but I can’t do something as simple as search for a text document across multiple virtual machines.
So, in the end, it’s obvious that headed towards a virtualized future. I just hope that it’s better than the present.