Mike Neil, Microsoft’s general manager virtualization strategy, confirmed in a blog post late last week that the public beta of the Veridian virtual server functionality has been delayed to the second half of 2007, while Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 has been pushed back to the second quarter.
Neil said the Veridian delay was introduced to ensure that the company met its internal performance and scalability goals, and denied that there will be any impact on the delivery of Windows Server Longhorn, due in the second half of the year.
In February Microsoft’s UK server director, Bruce Lynn, said that Longhorn was ready to ship once Microsoft decided its virtualization capabilities were ready to go, but Neil was quick to squash any speculation that the next rev of Microsoft server operating system might be delayed.
It’s important to know that Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ remains on schedule for beta 3 this half and R [release to manufacturing] in the second half, he wrote.
Veridian is the codename for the server virtualization hypervisor functionality that will be delivered within 180 days of Longhorn. According to Neill, it will scale up to 64 processors and will enable new processors, memory, disk, and networking to be added to the virtual environment without disrupting the virtualized system.
Meanwhile, Virtual Server is the name of Microsoft existing, standalone, server virtualization software. Neil explained that the first service pack to Virtual Server 2005 R2 had been delayed due to additional testing for three operating systems supported for the first time: Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, Sun’s Solaris 10, and the current Longhorn build.
