Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 11, 2008 17:05 UTC (Thu) by abacus (guest, #49001)
Parent article: Microsoft and Novell deliver Joint Virtualization Solution

Does anyone understand the relevance of running a Linux guest on a Windows host, instead of the other way around ? Is the only relevance of this that Microsoft is afraid of VMWare's competition (see also http://lwn.net/Articles/294812/) ?

Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 11, 2008 18:04 UTC (Thu) by einstein (guest, #2052) [Link]

The relevance is that running the guests under windows puts microsoft firmly in control, and in position to eventually levy whatever fees they want to. Want to run 20 debian instances? Sure, microsoft is fine with that, as long as they are running under their control.

Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 11, 2008 23:18 UTC (Thu) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link]

It's obvious isn't it? You get all the performance and reliability of Windows with the ability to run all that enterprise Linux-only software you keep hearing about.

Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 12, 2008 4:26 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

The benefit is that Microsoft has named VMWare one of their number one enemies. Microsoft sees VMWare as a serious competitor who could eventually rob them of license revenue. If Microsoft can't insert itself into the virtualization space they run the risk of declines in revenue as the result of virtualized linux server instances replacing Microsoft services.

The problem is the Microsoft doesn't get it.

Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 12, 2008 9:43 UTC (Fri) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link]

If a company relies on Windows servers, they're not going to switch over to Linux overnight, but rather switch individual services to the guest Linux system one by one over time. From a CxO point of view, it's less risky that way.

Eventually so many services will be working so well in the guest Linux system that not only will it be easier from that point on to make the complete switch to Linux, but CxO's will realise that it's just not cost effective to stick with Windows on those servers.

Linux guest on a Windows host

Posted Sep 12, 2008 12:48 UTC (Fri) by skitching (guest, #36856) [Link]

It doesn't look to me like "running a linux guest on a windows host" is the right description. From the wikipedia on hyper-v, it looks more like Xen than kvm, ie guests run on a hypervisor (which is *not* windows). However there clearly is some windows required (this "parent partition"); I wonder if this is just for running the vm-management tools, or whether it does more..

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V