I have a dual-processor, dual-core Opteron 265 system.
It doesn’t have DDR2, and along with what I can find on the web, I’m
pretty sure it doesn’t have Pacifica, so I can’t do full
virtualization. Right now it has Longhorn Server Build 5600 (August CTP)
x64 on it. But I would like to try out some virtualization stuff to try
different os’s and to isolate installs of Exchange 2007 Beta, etc. But
I can’t get any virtualization software installed - VMWare Server and
VMWare Workstation abort the installation and rollback just before completion,
and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (and R2 SP1 Beta 2) both complain that it
can’t find IIS, so it can’t install the management tools.
Okay, I may be crazy, but here’s what I’m thinking:
Microsoft’s partnered with Xen, and the Windows
Hypervisor (not due out for a private beta 1 for a few months yet, and at least
a year for the public release) is supposed to be compatible with Xen (or at the
guest os’s that support running on a Xen Hypervisor are supposed to work
on the Windows Hypervisor). Now the crazy part. I can’t do
hmv virtualization with Xen, because I don’t have Pacifica. But
wouldn’t it make sense, that since they’re developing the Windows
Hypervisor, that Longhorn will run on top of the Windows Hypervisor, and
because of compatibility, the Xen Hypervisor? And even though the Windows
Hypervisor isn’t due out for a while, they’d want to start putting
that support into the kernel of the OS before it’s RTMed, because they
don’t want to be making those kind of changes after it’s been
released? So wouldn’t they be in there now, at the RC1 (Vista RC1,
Longhorn August CTP, both build 5600; it’s been remarkable how much
Microsoft is actually using the same codebase for both os’s with this
major revision, 6.0) stage? So, how would I go about even attempting to
get a Xen Hypervisor based system, with Longhorn running. I can’t
use the hmv style config, because it’s not full virtualization. But
how do I specify the path to the kernel image, or even get Longhorn installed,
for a non-posix style system? I doubt Longhorn’s hypervisor support
is anywhere near being complete/good enough to be a dom-0 vm, but it would just
be cool to get a para-virtualized windows system working.
Maybe I’m assuming too much – has anyone tried
anything like this before?
