Massimo has taken some time out to share his views on how Viridian is shaping up and has a detailed review below
IT 2.0 Main Blog
Viridian (version 0) is here!
A few days ago Microsoft released Release Candidate 0 for Windows Server 2008. Apparently, in a last minute rush before the final RC0 build was "cooked", they wanted to give the industry a taste of how Windows Server Virtualization (aka Viridian) will look like. I took the opportunity to get the build and give it a try in my lab. This is not going to be a detailed step-by-step guide on how to install Viridian nor a complete analysis of its functionalities (it’s still in pre-beta so it wouldn’t even make much sense). It’s really a "log" of what I have been playing with for about 4 hours and I wanted to share it…
The setup
While setting this up is not rocket science I found useful following a few hints that a good friend of mine (that is by chance) working at MS posted on his blog a few days ago (thanks Giorgio).
First and most important Viridian will not run on any computer out there. In order to enable it you do need to enable two technologies in the server BIOS to make it run:
- Intel-VT or AMD-V depending on the processor you are using
- No Execute (NX) or Execute Disabled (XD) bit again depending on the processor you are using.
In my test I have used an IBM HS21 blade with 2 x dual-core Intel processors and 16GB of memory so this is what my BIOS had to look like (this is a remote kvm session of the server through the Bladecenter Management Module):
You need to make sure your hardware supports this features before boiling the ocean with Viridian.
At that point you would just install Windows Server 2008 RC0 following the typical Microsoft next-next-next-done procedures. One important thing to notice is that the setup program will offer you a choice of installing Windows in a standard manner or in the so called "Core" mode (Core mode is a stripped-down install with limited services installed and no GUI). Do NOT choose this if you want to use Viridian afterwards because Viridian will apparently not work at this pre-beta stage in Core mode). By the way it saved me some time having worked with Vista for quite a while. The Win2008 GUI is very Vista-like so… if you are not familiar with that it might take you a little more to get around in the GUI.
continued at source…
IT 2.0 Main Blog : Viridian (version 0) is here!
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