OzVMs's Damian Murdoch was able to get an interview with Microsoft's Michael Kleef, a Technology Specialist.  Damian was able to find out more about Microsoft's hypervisor product and the future of virtualization.  Read his interview to find out more information about Microsoft's future in the virtualization space.

Where is Microsoft’s hypervisor headed and what plans are down the line for the technology ?

MK: The clear thing here is that Microsoft’s hypervisor (Windows Server Virtualisation) technology is new. It runs only on Intel VT or AMD-V (formly Pacifica) technology. It doesn’t run on top of an OS like Virtual Server does today. We haven’t openly discussed plans beyond the upcoming Windows Server Virtualisation which will be included as part of Longhorn Server.

Does Microsoft’s current product offering compete at the same level as other companies offerings ?

MK: Certainly there are areas which we compete at where we offer a higher level of value. Namely clustering which in Virtual Server is still free today. Architecturally we are very similar in many areas to others in the market.

It has been mentioned in news articles that hypervisor will be coming after longhorn, is this timeframe still accurate ?

MK: Windows Server Virtualisation will be a feature of Longhorn Server within 6 months of release of the operating system.

What feature sets can you tell us about in Microsofts current and future offerings?

MK: In Windows Server Virtualisation we will be able to support 64bit guests, multi proc VM’s and hot add support for memory, storage and networking.

How will those feature sets help the business ?

MK: With nearly every vendor now shipping x64 units and many of Microsoft’s application servers such as SQL 2005 and Exchange 2007 running x64 means that additional memory addressing will be possible that wasn’t before. The ability to hot add will allow running services to gain immediate advantage of resources that can be dynamically added. These will allow even larger server consolidation scenarios to occur and will allow further cost reductions to be realised within business without downtime to dynamically add memory and other resources for performance and scale.

Read the rest of the interview, here.