Microsoft plans summer ’05 for first Longhorn beta release…
Tester’s get ready! An interview with Bog Muglia reveals some interesting facts about the upcoming Windows release, dubbed Longhorn.
[Bob] Muglia reconfirmed that Longhorn Server Beta 1 will ship this summer, around the same time as Longhorn client Beta 1. And based on a comment from one of the Microsoft chat moderators, it sounds as if the current plan is to have code in testers’ hands by August.
It went on to talk about server roles… IMHO, anything to ease a server configurationis a good thing.
Microsoft officials have said that Longhorn Server will be role-based, allowing administrators to choose from among 20 different “levels of functionality” (such as print server; DHCP server, etc.) when configuring and deploying their Windows Server systems for specific tasks.
Longhorn Server also will include Network Access Protection security functionality; additional management capabilities; a new version of Internet Information Services; new Terminal Server functionality; cached-storage technology; a new error-reporting subsystem, code-named “Crimson”; and the Indigo Windows communications subsystem, which in Longhorn Server, will facilitate the distribution of applications, according to Muglia.
Bob Muglia made a specific reference to Virtualization in the upcoming servers:
Today, we have a product called Virtual Server that sits on top of Windows and provides virtualization capabilities. In the future, we’re going to build the hypervisor and the virtualization stack into Windows. So while it’s a whole new set of technologies, much, if not all, of what Virtual Server does today goes into the operating system. It becomes an operating system feature.
… When we think about operating system generations, I think about the ’07 generations of the operating system, say ’07-’08 as all being Longhorn, maybe even to ’09 for Longhorn R2. Whether it’s ’10 or ’11, we’ll have to look to see. It will be somewhere in that time frame we would do Blackcomb [the successor to Longhorn]. So the virtualization features are in the Longhorn time frame, but it’s not in the initial release of Longhorn.
This is great news for VMWare. It validates that Virtualization is a huge part of our future computing landscape.
Original article:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1828570,00.asp