Here comes free Hyper-V Server 2008

FYI: If you want to follow along, the conference URL is http://www.getvirtualnow.com and they will be webcasting the keynote/product launch starting at 9AM Pacific at www.microsoft.com/.../default.mspx

Waethorn, I'm guessing that somewhere down the line, the componentisation they're trying with windows may well lead to a similar concept to the X-window server, and may bring about the idea of having the server itself running remotely, and the client drawing the windowing system locally, allowing high performance remote desktop environments. Of course, my understanding of such systems is minimal, and I can only make uneducated guesses, or "hopes" :D

gorath: I'm thinking that virtualization is exactly the kind of environment where a windowing "server" would fit - the client windowing system is where the virtualized video hardware could be shared between VM's. Of course, you'd have to unify the OS's into a single windowing server subsystem that would have to be linked, at least partially, to the Hypervisor, in order to break down the VM processes to the virtualized hardware. The first step to this would be to build Windows on a server/client windowing system and to virtualize video hardware while the windowing server runs in the background, thereby "sandboxing" video processes by application. It would make sense to further break this kind of technology down into a multi-OS-supported Hypervisor core that also runs the windowing server for at least Windows. What you'd see on the actual "desktop" would be just a client presentation that uses the virtualized hardware. Finally, as you mentioned gorath, it could lead to high-performance remote desktop environments. Rich cloud computing, anyone? How would you have a remote server windowing system that was actually running on a remote machine link to virtualized hardware on the desktop though? Remote Hypervisor?? Is it even necessary??? Care to add, Mike?

I'm not even going to get into the X windowing system. For those not familiar with it, it uniquely lends itself to confusion in discussion since the piece you run on your terminal (or computer acting as a terminal) is the server and the part that runs on your server is the client. So the client is on the server and the server is on the client. Presentation virtualization has been around for years in Terminal Services. Moving up from that is application virtualization with App-V, then comes VDI which does server hosted desktop virtualization, above that is MED-V which allows for VM virtualization of apps or whole desktops and allows running incompatible apps. It's a VERY rich and flexible suite of virtualization options that allow just about any possible combination that's needed for a given scenario.

Microsoft released a new server hardware virtualization product yesterday: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.