back to article Microsoft to make Ubuntu a first-class guest under Hyper-V

Microsoft's revealed a plan to make Ubuntu 18.04 a "first-class" guest under Hyper-V. Microsoft's definition of first-class may sound a bit ho-hum for users of other desktop hypervisors, as it includes window resizing, a clipboard that goes from host to guest and back again, something Microsoft's called a "Better mouse …

  1. Sgt_Oddball
    Facepalm

    Poring cold water on it....

    No mention of moving from an Aws bucket though to azure or even hyper-v.. just saying...

    I really would have thought they'd put more effort in tying to steal amazons customers than VMwares. But what do I know?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Poring cold water on it....

      "No mention of moving from an Aws bucket though to azure or even hyper-v.. just saying..."

      At present you need a Zerto migration license or similar to do that if you are stuck in Amazon's crappy cloud.

      "I really would have thought they'd put more effort in tying to steal amazons customers than VMwares. But what do I know?"

      Customers are already moving in droves - Azure and the associated stack such as O365 is simply a better solution for enterprises. Microsoft overtook AWS in IAAS in early 2017 and overtook them in total cloud revenue run rate 3 quarters ago.

      1. moonpunk

        Re: Poring cold water on it....

        What on earth are you talking about? The only reason Microsoft overtook Amazon for Cloud Revenue was because they started including O365 (and now Dynamics 365) revenues in their collective revenue figures - it's a point that is constantly on everyone's lips on the Microsoft quarterly revenue calls, but gets shut down every time (a bit like Apple never actually declaring how well (or not) their Apple Watch sales are - they just don't separate it out).

        Last quarter Microsoft had 500m active Azure subscriptions, AWS had almost 1.7bn!

        Don't get me wrong I like Azure, and O365 (they have over 100m business O365 subscribers and 57m personal O365 subscribers). But if you're going to quote statistics and "facts" at least check them first before just arbitrarily making them up - you could have just used Google after all (or maybe even Bing)!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Poring cold water on it....

          "The only reason Microsoft overtook Amazon for Cloud Revenue was because they started including O365 (and now Dynamics 365) revenues in their collective revenue figures "

          Which are clearly cloud based services. And they don't so far include Xbox Live which is also a massive cloud based service with circa 50 million users.

          "Last quarter Microsoft had 500m active Azure subscriptions, AWS had almost 1.7bn!"

          Microsoft are winning where it matters - the volume business of large enterprises - and are growing market share direct directly at AWS's expense.

          " But if you're going to quote statistics and "facts" at least check them first "

          They are directly from Microsoft's and AWS quarter accounting statements. And whilst you have tried to spread some FUD, you haven't identified anything that was not factually correct.

          1. moonpunk

            Re: Poring cold water on it....

            "...Microsoft overtook AWS in IAAS in early 2017"

            Factually incorrect - there you go!

            Even with their SaaS and PaaS offerings, Microsoft only just tip the balance on quarterly revenue. AWS is bigger by customer numbers AND revenue when it comes to IaaS - no question!

            You made it up - your statistics are wrong and you are FACTUALLY INCORRECT!

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Poring cold water on it....

              ""...Microsoft overtook AWS in IAAS in early 2017"

              Factually incorrect - there you go!"

              No - it's accurate - here you go:

              https://rcpmag.com/articles/2017/04/05/azure-vs-aws-in-enterprise.aspx?m=1

              "Even with their SaaS and PaaS offerings, Microsoft only just tip the balance on quarterly revenue. "

              By a couple of $ billion now. And the gap is growing.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Poring cold water on it....

              >> Microsoft overtook AWS in IAAS in early 2017

              This is correct as stated - MS overtook AWS in some ways as per the article linked to by the OP. Overtaking them in revenue did come a bit later though.

              >> You made it up - your statistics are wrong and you are FACTUALLY INCORRECT!

              I checked - It's true if you look at Microsoft's annual report and Amazon's - Microsoft overtook Amazon in cloud revenue run rate 3 quarters ago, and are still growing much faster - the gap is now several billion dollars a year.

  2. naive

    Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

    With VmWare it is possible to run any OS which boots on a X86-64. Never understood why HyperV and also Azure are restricting the choice of OS guest it accepts.

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

      Never understood why HyperV and also Azure are restricting the choice of OS guest it accepts.

      Perhaps they have the hooks inside their hypervisor that allows them to snoop on what you are doing from day 1 and that these don't exist for other OS's?

      Naturally, they'll say it is for support reasons but... {engage conspiracy theory engine}

    2. Michael B.

      Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

      They don't restrict what you can do with them. There is an Android emulator that runs on Hyper-V. This is about providing a few extra services for better integration which you can take or leave frankly.

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

        This sounds like a headless system running on a (local) VM talking RDP, except that...

        "Think of it as similar to TCP, except it's going over an optimized transport layer called VMBus."

        ...apparently TCP over the loopback adapter wasn't fast enough for them (boggle!) so they hacked up something non-portable and persuaded the XRDP folks to support it.

        All very odd, if you ask me. I'm not familiar with Hyper-V but this isn't encouraging me to find out more. I'm rather surprised that something like this hasn't existed for ages and/or that they felt the existing performance was bad enough to justify this amount of hackery. If they are this far behind the competition then I think I'll pass, thanks.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

          "If they are this far behind the competition then I think I'll pass, thanks."

          Pretty much no one runs Ubuntu as a server that's why they have not bothered with native remote support until now. It always worked - you just had to use RSI inducing crap like SSH to manage it.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

      Embrace a competing OS a bit, but not over there. Reduce support by a little bit a while later, support another OS a bit, then reduce support... eee by gum the games they play.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why can HyperV not implement a proper X86-64 ?

      "Never understood why HyperV and also Azure are restricting the choice of OS guest it accepts."

      They don't restrict it. It just depends if you want to be fully supported or not. Just like with vSphere.

  3. Crypto Monad Silver badge

    Microsoft's idea of system administration...

    ... is that everything has a desktop. So obviously, if you are running an Ubuntu virtual machine you need XRDP to administer it.

    I thought with Powershell they might have gotten over this mentality, but it seems not.

    Anyone sane running services in Ubuntu VMs will be running Ubuntu *Server* edition which cuts out the desktop. They'll administer them over ssh, and they'll use bulk administration tools like ansible, stackstorm, salt, chef, puppet etc.

    They might revert to the console if they screw up the network interface configuration, but that's about it. VGA text or serial console is fine for that.

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Microsoft's idea of system administration...

      Do sane people run ubuntu as a server though?

      I thought people skipped the middle man and went for debian if they want that genre (similarly centos/rhel instead of fedora)

      To my mind, ubuntu is the desktop incarnation of linux

      1. thames

        Re: Microsoft's idea of system administration...

        Anonymous Coward said: "Do sane people run ubuntu as a server though?"

        Funny how there's all these anonymous posts on this thread making various claims about other company's products.

        Ubuntu is used very extensively in cloud applications. Microsoft isn't putting so much emphasis on supporting Ubuntu because they've run out of other things to do.

        Canonical have always placed a lot of emphasis on server and cloud applications. That is why they have a number of deployment and management tools focused on that area. The desktop version of Ubuntu is just a loss-leader intended to get developers using Ubuntu, with the intention that those developers will also use Ubuntu as their choice of server. People who have connections inside Ubuntu have said a number of times that Canonical's server business has been profitable for some time now. They've recently dropped the phone OS project, and Unity has been scaled back as they currently focus on profitability, supposedly to clean up the balance sheet in order to go for a stock market listing.

        Ubuntu is based on Debian, but has the advantage of offering commercial support contracts for those who want them. Debian themselves of course do not, and finding commercial support for it is not as straightforward.

      2. NLCSGRV

        Re: Microsoft's idea of system administration...

        "To my mind, ubuntu is the desktop incarnation of linux"

        A desktop incarnation of Linux, not "the" desktop incarnation. Not by a long shot.

    2. mgbrown

      Re: Microsoft's idea of system administration...

      "Anyone sane running services in Ubuntu VMs will be running Ubuntu *Server* edition which cuts out the desktop."

      Those of us that are developing cross platform desktop apps will probably find this very useful. Not everyone is a server administrator!

      Currently I have a Surface Pro 3 and duel boot it because Ubuntu running in a VM doesn't seem to support the high dpi screen. I know I could probably get this working with a different virtualisation platform, but it's easier to use the one build into the host OS.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microsoft's idea of system administration...

      "I thought with Powershell they might have gotten over this mentality, but it seems not."

      Powershell is a better shell - not a remote desktop protocol. This solution is to give you remote GUI access.

      "Anyone sane running services in Ubuntu VMs will be running Ubuntu *Server* edition which cuts out the desktop"

      Anyone sane wanting a server wouldn't use Ubuntu. This is to give you the option of GUI access if you want it.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "and duel boot it because Ubuntu "

    Yes that must be a fight. Circa half the battery life under Ubuntu for a start.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    5 people who still care about Ubuntu

    1. Micro$oft

    2.

    3.

    4.

    5.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 5 people who still care about Ubuntu

      "5 people who still care about Ubuntu

      1. Micro$oft"

      Only because you can use it to run legacy / *NIX software under Windows:

      https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ubuntu/9nblggh4msv6

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: 5 people who still care about Ubuntu

        Interesting.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 5 people who still care about Ubuntu

        "Only because you can use it to run legacy / *NIX software under Windows:"

        Our legacy software already runs natively under Windows. Approx 80% of our new systems run on CentOS.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 5 people who still care about Ubuntu

          "Approx 80% of our new systems run on CentOS."

          100% of ours run on Windows. (Large asset manager). We got rid of our last legacy midrange / *Nix system over a year ago.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    So much for your VM's that arn't fully on 7 and 8.1

    Like a Zombie, I was going to download Wally Wunas No10,

    But I read in the License, you cannot work around anything Microsoft doesn't want you to work around, without Microsoft telling you what the fuck they are doing, or only telling you sometime after the O/S is dead and deserted.

    so I stopped, with sweat on my brow.

    Phew that was close.

    Today I install a Linux to a USB3 Drive, maybe I'll install a couple of flavours in front and my data in the back. - I can swap the SATA drive with the drive in the box at anytime

    Hear that "AT ANYTIME".

  7. Doug 3

    Redhat

    let me guess, trying to split away some of the power Redhat has by promoting Ubuntu.

    Not a surprise but generally Microsoft just wants to be able to keep track of what their customers are doing. If some are migrating machines to Linux then they would rather they migrated in a way which allows them to track what is going on. A full on removal of Windows is what they have been willing to do illegal things to prevent. Probably some of the same going on here.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Redhat

      "trying to split away some of the power Redhat has by promoting Ubuntu."

      I doubt they care too much about Redhat. It's way more expensive to license than Windows as a server for lower performance in most common roles. It's "free" OSS stuff Microsoft are more worried about I would think.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Redhat

      "A full on removal of Windows is what they have been willing to do illegal things to prevent."

      They have already largely headed that off with Linux running under Windows 10. Expect to see the same for Windows Server in the near future so that you can run say Linux containers under a fast modern hybrid microkernel. And possibly for Hyper-V Server too.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Resist! You must Resist!

    MS are just doing stuff like this to make their wares more appealing to businesses that want turn key contract solutions. Open Source BADLY needs to look at why GPL doesn't fare well in the board room. The answer is really simple. GPL means no sue-balls or fingerpointing at supplier X when someone screws up. Not that I recall many successfully being able to sue MS for shifting crud, mind you.

    We recently confirmed a move to Office 365, however our security folks won't let us put docs classified as company confidential (which is almost everything!) onto the cloud side storage. Joined up thinking, a lack thereof.

    To me this is just yet another example of trying to assimilate to accumulate on MS part; and I do wonder if they are going to go the whole hog to buy Canonical. It would be a logical step, no, to make Windows 10 the last version ever (which is what we were promised, if you remember?)

  9. Kabukiwookie

    Step 2 - Embrace

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Oh oh oh can I guess number 3?!

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