by
Gabe Knuth
A month ago I wrote that VMware is ahead of its time due to their cloud vision and the "New Stack" that was laid out at VMworld. The "New Stack" is so different, in fact, that I got the feeling that VMware feels like there's no place for Windows in the cloud.
Last week, Microsoft announced that they feel differently. At their Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft revealed (Alessandro, MSDN) the Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role for Windows Server 2008 R2, or WAVMRWS2k8R2 :) The VM Role will enable customers to run Windows VMs in the Azure cloud by building VHD images on site and uploading them to Azure, where they can then be accessed via RDP.
The point of the VM Role isn't actually to bring Windows to the cloud, but to provide a migration path for organizations to take advantage of Azure without migrating their applications to an entirely different platform.
We should see a public beta of the VM Role by the end of 2010. Eventually, we'll see the ability to build VM's directly in the cloud (ETA sometime in 2011), as well as support for both Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 SP2 VM's (also, presumably in 2011).
Also mentioned (again) is Server App-V, which we've been waiting to see materialize for at least two years now. Server App-V will allow you to provision applications to servers the same way that you provision them to desktops using App-V today. With regards to the cloud, however, Microsoft announced that Server App-V will allow you to deploy these applications directly to the cloud without first packaging them in a VM or rewriting them. Server App-V is expected to be available as a tech preview by the end of 2010, with a final release in the second half of 2011.
The fact that these two announcements happened at a developers conference is no mistake. Microsoft is banking Azure and their entire cloud model on the legions of Visual Studio developers in the world. If Microsoft only allowed new applications to run on Azure, there would essentially be two isolated groups of VS coders, one for Azure and one for regular old Windows apps. That's the kind of situation that would give VMware a leg up in the future cloud world.
These latest developments show that Microsoft plans to still be relevant in the future by allowing the developers to continue doing what they've always done, instead of learning something new and rewriting all of their code. How this applies to desktops remains to be seen, but you can bet that keeping Microsoft relevant as the world moves towards IaaS, Paas, and all the other cloud models is good for us all. What do you think? Is Microsoft poised to keep Windows going, or just delaying the inevitable?
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