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Microsoft plans native VHD support in Windows 7


By David Worthington
May 23, 2008 — 
Sometimes the world is in a grain of sand. A help-wanted ad has revealed that Microsoft intends to add native support for the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format to Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista that the company has slated for release in 2010.

A job listing posted to Microsoft’s Careers Web site on May 21 seeks a candidate who would have responsibilities for “creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs natively in Windows.”

The hire would be joining Microsoft’s Core OS team, which creates the fundamentals of the operating system. The job posting explains Microsoft’s reasoning for embedding virtualization into Windows.

It reads, “Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7—come help us achieve this goal.”

Microsoft is trying to keep pace with the way the technology is going, said Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio. She added, “If it’s built in, it’s one less thing to worry about.”

When asked about whether Microsoft’s bundling of virtualization middleware could raise antitrust concerns, DiDio stated that Microsoft is acutely aware of the terms and conditions of the 2002 consent decree that it reached with the U.S. Department of Justice, and that it would likely live within those boundaries.

In the case of virtualization, she said, Microsoft is the underdog. “VMware has a substantial lead. Everyone from Citrix to Microsoft to Oracle would concede that [VMware] has the best [virtualization] products. The fact is that they don’t have the market to themselves anymore; the market is theirs to lose,” DiDio noted.


Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, storage software, virtualization, Windows


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