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According to eweek.com, Microsoft says no to virtualizing Windows on top of Linux:

Microsoft will not allow Windows Vista or Windows XP to be virtualized on top of Linux, Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab, said at the annual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here Aug. 7.

I find this very hard to believe, and I'm struggling to find other sources for this little piece of information. Reading the rest of the article doesn't really give any more details, besides other comments from Sam Ramji regarding other details about the Microsoft Novell agreement.

The way the article reads, I doubt that Microsoft is really going to try and disallow running virtualized Microsoft producs on top of Linux. I think Mr. Ramji really meant to say that there will be no ability to move virtual machines from Viridian to Xen or vice-versa. Or at least thats what I hope he means.

After all, it is in Microsoft interest that people can run virtualized instances even if they run on a Linux host machine as virtual instances also needs to be licensed properly.

Does anyone have more info regarding this statement? It really strikes me as a bit odd, but I'm not quite able to shake eweeks spin on it entirely until I get confirmation somewhere else.

Seems like Microsoft is having problems with delivering some of the promised features that were to be present in Viridian (Longhorn Virtualization). Yesterday the following was published by Windows Server Division WebLog:

So we are making the following changes, and postponing these features to a future release of Windows Server virtualization: · No Live migration · No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor) · Support limit of 16 cores/logical processors (e.g., 2 processor, quad-core systems is 8 cores; or 4 processor, quad-core system is 16 cores)

The lack of initial support for over 16 cores is one thing, but no hot-add of resources and especially no Live Migration was a surprise to me. Perhaps thats why you aren't really allowed to migrate virtual machines to often?

Jokes aside, I think this is a somewhat major blow for Viridian and Longhorn, I really did think at least Live Migration would make it into the final product. After all, thats one of the key points with VMWare VI3, and makes management of the host systems much easier and reduces scheduled downtime to a minimum.