pparks1 said:

"The cloud is a tectonic shift," said Microsoft's corporate vice president of server and cloud Bill Laing, introducing an in-depth press preview of Windows Server 8 and mixing metaphors with abandon.

In response to this cloudy earthquake, the company is declaring Server 8 to be a cloud-based operating system, though note that this is not about Azure – Microsoft's platform as a service – but instead focused on plain Windows Server running on virtual machines, either in private clouds at corporate data centres, or in public clouds hosted by Microsoft partners

Windows Server 8: Now with added VMware and Unix ? The Register


Couple of points: Cloud here means running Server 8 as a virtual machine, either in your own server room, or in a hosted facility. I'm fine with this, installing a server based OS directly on hardware is really a thing of the past.

Really excited to hear MS acknowledge that running GUI Management tools on the server directly is really not a good thing and will become a thing of the past. Instead, remote management tools will be used and the servers themselves will not be cluttered with a bunch of overhead and extra services and such which are not necessary. This is way more inline with the way that Unix and Linux does things.

Hi there

things like W8 server etc seem absolutely 100% tailor made to run as a virtual server on applications like vmware's ESxi or an equivalent offering from MS (when and if there is one although the Hypervisor system on W2008 server is getting near the idea).

I'm currently running two W2003 virtual servers and a W2008 virtual server on a relatively modest "White box".
Performance is for the most part at least around 90% of Native - and while measuring true performance on a Virtual Server is not a trivial task I really suspect most people would not be able to tell if the server was running on real or virtual hardware.

With ESXI's pass through facility you get the best of both worlds -- minimal OS overhead (ESxi boots in a few secs and is TINY) and the facility that allows some pci hardware cards to be directly accessed by the relevant Virtual server when they are needed.

The Esxi console is run via a remote application as are methods for starting / stopping / configuring the VM's.

I agree there is no reason these days to run a GUI console on the server itself.

I have a sneaking fealing that Windows 8 server will be a total winner especially if it's essentially designed to be run as a virtual server from the outset with cases of it being run on real hardware as exceptions rather than the norm.

(slightly OT -- Getting W2008 server to run on Esxi caused me a little problem -- Direct Virtual Machine install using VMSPHERE would give me very poor mouse control and jitterey screen graphics -- but installing first as a Vm under vmware on a W7 system and then converting it to Esxi format via the vmware stand alone converter fixed the problem ??????? !!!!).


Cheers
jimbo