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New goodies in Virtual Server

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[source: CNet]

Several new exciting features in Virtual Server got publicly announced at Intel Developer Forum:

• An individual virtual machine will be able to run powerful multiprocessor work loads--likely as many as eight processors for a single machine.

• Users will be able to move virtual machines as they run from one computer to another "with no visible downtime."

• Users will be able to store a virtual machine's state on a hard drive, letting a user stop and restart a virtual machine or take "snapshots" of a machine at a particular time.

• Microsoft will support both 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machines, though a 64-bit operating system will be required to host the system.

• Microsoft will compensate for different memory access speeds that are increasingly common in mainstream servers. This computer design principle is called nonuniform memory access, or NUMA, and Kieffer said it's a complicating factor with multicore processors.

Also, integration with Hypervisor (CPU support for virtualization from Intel) and Pacifica (same thing from AMD) is on the way.

Being a snapshot guy, I especially like the "virtual machine snapshot" feature. This will be able to create point-in-time copies of the whole running state of a virtual machine. This has deep impact on backup strategies - we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here.

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