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Microsoft sent Mary Jo Foley, of ZDnet an email with an official reponse regarding the VMware whitepaper.

Addendum: On February 27, Microsoft supplied an official response to the VMware white paper, attributable to Neil. Here it is in full: “Microsoft believes the claims made in VMware’s whitepaper contain several inaccuracies and misunderstandings of our current license and use policies, our support policy and our commitment to technology collaboration. We believe that we are being progressive and fair with our existing licensing and use policies and creating a level playing field for partners and customers. We are deeply committed to providing high-quality technical support to our customers who are utilizing virtualization technology. In addition, we are committed to working collaboratively with industry leaders to foster an environment of interoperability and cooperation that best serves our customers. “We believe it's better to resolve VMware’s claims between our two companies so that we can better serve customers and the industry. EMC is a long-time partner of Microsoft. We've extended this courtesy to VMware due to our mutual customers and partnership with EMC. We are committed to continuing to collaborate with VMware as we have been doing on regular basis. Consistent with this, Microsoft believes that we will be able to accommodate a mutually agreeable solution between our two companies and clear up any existing misunderstanding with regard to the points raised in the whitepaper.”
source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=283

While this seems to indicate that Microsoft will be looking to resolve the issues raised by VMware, I still see this email as nothing more than an attempt to further muddy the water as it really doesn't address anything at all. Microsoft also seems to ignore the fact that there are more virtualization vendors out there, besides themselves and VMware. The licensing restrictions put in place by Microsoft doesn't just affect VMware customers, and Microsoft should really try to tackle this in a much more generic way.

In a recent VMware press release/whitepaper Microsoft has been accused of "playing dirty" and using unfair tactics in the virtualization market. VMware provides a list of areas where they believe that Microsoft imposes limits on their customers flexibility and tries to utilize their market share to force customers to not use other virtualization vendors technology and products.

VMware presents a very good case in that document, and there are a few key points that I really do find interesting:

3. De-Activation of Microsoft Virtual Machines on Third-Party Virtualization Software Some Microsoft VHDs are now configured to de-activate themselves if they are run on any virtualization product besides Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server (for example, this Internet Explorer / Windows XP trial VM).

4. Prohibition of Translation or Manipulation of Microsoft VMs into Other Formats Another restriction is that Microsoft’s VHD End User License Agreements forbid the conversion of the Microsoft VMs into any virtual machine format other than the VHD format. Microsoft is strictly enforcing their VHD format on users and ISVs as a closed ecosystem and not allowing compatibility or translation with other formats (for example, this Windows Server VM).

This is something I have experienced directly. Some time ago Microsoft approached the Gallery project, asking us why we were not actively supporting MS SQL Server as a RDBMS option. Our reply was simple; We don't have the licenses needed for our developers to be able to develop for that platform, and the Gallery project is not in a position where we want to spend a lot of money on licenses for developers.

In the end we settled on using the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition VHD for our development purposes. That enabled us to get quite some testing and bugfixing done, so it has definitely helped the Gallery project, but the VHD is limited to a 30 day trial, which effectively means that we need to rebuild it every 30 days. The second problem with using it, is that you have to run it inside Microsofts Virtual Server software. Converting the VHD renders it useless. Again this means that every Gallery developer that wants to test their code on Microsoft SQL Server, will have to run this on a Windows based host.

Running this with VMware Server/Player, or even Xen, would have been much more flexible since we wouldn't have to worry that much about which host OS the developers use.

This is a direct example of how the limitations imposed by Microsoft makes it hard for end users and developers, and thats even after Microsoft themselves approached us to have us support their products. Truth be told, we are talking to Microsoft regarding getting proper licenses for our development needs, but that seems to be a time consuming task and I'm not really sure Microsoft themselves really know how they should tackle that.

5. Licensing Restrictions on Server Virtual Machine Mobility Situation: One of the most important benefits of virtualization is the mobility of virtual machines, given that an entire application and operating system environment can be encapsulated in a virtual machine and then moved from machine to machine, replicated to disaster recovery sites, and migrated without downtime from one machine to another dynamically through VMotion. Most virtualization customers have adopted and actively use capabilities such as VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling to balance resources across their applications and hardware, avoid hardware downtime, and facilitate scaling and responsiveness in their IT infrastructure.

This point really bothers me. Basically the new license terms prohibits movement of Windows Server licenses more than once per 90 days. Does Microsoft really believe that VMware VMotion users will abide by this? And seriously, what is the point? First they give me 4 virtualized instances for each Microsoft Server 2003 Advanced Server license I buy, then they try to tell me that I can't move the virtualized instances between my physical hosts? I'm sorry Microsoft, but you will definately have to drag me to court, kicking and screaming, before I even consider taking that seriously.

As far as the rest of the document released by VMware goes, I'm going to leave that to the experts. Closed APIs in Longhorn etc. are beyond my current knowledge level so I'll refrain from commenting on that.

Mike Neil, Microsoft GM virtualization strategy, has also posted on the Technet Windows Server blog commenting on recent virtualization buzz and sharing his views on where virtualization is heading. While I agree with Mike's view that desktop virtualization isn't mature enough for consumers yet, I don't think that is a valid argument for the EULA limitations on running the home editions of Windows Vista in a virtualized environment. After all, the maturity level he is looking for can only come from mature virtualization vendors, and right now Microsofts actions can not be seen as mature at all.

I really thought Microsoft were beginning to understand the value of virtualization, at least it's value to end users, with the 4 for 1 license deals and the recent SQL Server Enterprise license change, sadly it seems that this is just the somewhat random results of Microsofts repositioning in the virtualization field.

In an earlier post, from September 2005, I mentioned Firefoxadm as a solution for centrally managing a corporate (Active Directory) based Firefox deployment. Today I stumbled across a project that seems to be moving towards the same goal.

The Firefox Corporate Project looks really interesting and although it requires a few manual steps it seems to be very easy to implement.

Using custom .adm templates and .MSI packages makes it as easy to manage Firefox as it is to manage Internet Explorer.

I still wonder though, why doesn't Mozilla build that kind of functionality into the standard package? It would really make sense for them to do so, if they really want larger organizations to switch over. I can't imagine that they don't want that?

The company I work for has, with a lot of help from me, finally decided to walk down the real virtualization road. We have played a lot with both VMware Workstation and VMware server until now, but not the real deal ESX server.

Over the summer, two brand new IBM xSeries 366 with double dual-core CPUs and a brand new DS4300 based SAN, will grace our datacenter. I can't wait to get down and dirty with the new VMware 3.0 release, scheduled for release sometime this month.

We will be converting some 15 servers over to a new virtualized environment in the time to come, as well as setting up a bunch of new much needed server installations.

I'm excited!

In a security bulletin just published, Microsoft announces out-of-cycle release of patch to fix the recently discovered, and published, WMF file exploit (http://www.websensesecuritylabs.com/alerts/alert.php?AlertID=385 )

The security update will be available at 2:00 pm PT as MS06-001. Enterprise customers who are using Windows Server Update Services will receive the update automatically. In additional the update is supported Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.0, Systems Management Server, and Software Update Services. Enterprise customers can also manually download the update from the Download Center. Microsoft will hold a special Web cast on Friday, January 6, 2006, to provide technical details on the MS06-001 and to answer questions. Registration details will be available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/default.mspx.

Time to fire up a manual update after that time. Thankfully I'm running WSUS at work, which should take care of this automatically.