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windows server 2003

FastScale Ships New Release of Composer Suite, Adds Windows and RHEL 5.2 Support

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FastScale Technology today announced (PDF) the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite, which it claims to be the only technology on the market today to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying server software environments for enterprise class data centers and Web farms, whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both. The new release adds support for Windows Server 2003 environments, new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.

The new features in detail:

  • New platform support – including deployment of Windows Server 2003 and RHEL 5.2 environments.
  • Lightweight application provisioning – for just-in-time, virtualized deployment of modular, enterprise class applications, enabling increased infrastructure performance and stateless server configurations.
  • Increased scalability & usability – with streamlined configuration settings, enhanced Web and command line interfaces, and easier navigation for large enterprise deployments.

FastScale Composer Suite with support for Windows is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000.

Microsoft Longhorn Datacenter Server will have no virtualization licensing costs

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Today virtualization is expensive for licensing. Microsoft asks people to license every OS installed on virtual machines, even if powered off. But something is changing.

Since the release of Windows Server 2003 R2 Microsoft started approaching a per-use licensing model instead of a per-installation model. So that now Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition owners can run up to 4 virtual machines with same OS at no additional costs.

This trend is going be stronger in the near future: the next Microsoft operating system for servers, codename Longhorn, actually in beta, will permit to use infinite virtual machines with same OS onboard at no additional costs, buying the Datacenter edition.
So if you have a performing hardware able to run 100 VMs, you’ll still have to pay just 1 Longhorn Datacenter Server license.

This is what Scott Bekker reported on a Redmondmag December 2005 article.

This move could slighty reduce customers feeling open source competing products (Xen) are a better investment.