No Really: Microsoft giving away Windows Image with redistribution allowed | Hacker News Reader

No Really: Microsoft giving away Windows Image with redistribution allowed

sdtimes.com

87 pointsVonGuard30 comments

No tricks. Microsoft is giving away Windows Server 2008. And you can even redistribute the image.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 appears to be a no-gui virtualization host (hypervisor). There's a feature chart here that alludes to an unclear licensing issue with "guest virtualization rights". [1]

The downloadable image is 1.5 GB.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

So I can run windows as a headless baselayer to virtualize paid for copies of windows. Rather than using Linux or the built in Xen hypervisor.

If you have no interest in virtualizing Windows then this won't be of much use to you. First class support for Linux is limited to Suse and RedHat Enterprise.

However, if you're a Microsoft shop and want to virtualize Windows (be it for production, testing, or development), it's a huge boon. Hyper-V even supports some awesome features like live migration (moving a VM from one host to another) with mere seconds of downtime. Similar features in VMWare cost thousands of dollars.

At Loopt we're going to be using this extensively for development.

Hyper-V is a bit of a pain as it doesn't let you over-commit on memory.

VMWare ESXi looks like a much better bet - I'm currently thinking about moving 40+ VMs in a development environment from Hyper-V to ESX so we can run more of them at the same time.

It can be counted as a benefit.

You will appreciate the fact that your hosting provider cannot oversell the servers. Xen also works like this.

Xen actually does support overcommit: http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2008/08/27/xen-33-feature-memo...

Actually, with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 it will add dynamic memory which is the same as VMware's memory overcommit as well as RemoteFX for 3D graphics display for virtualized desktops.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/198736.asp

Wow, I must be behind the times. Microsoft have a headless server? Windows as a hypervisor?

Thank you for posting this, as this is news to me.

Hey cool, an irritating JS overlay as soon as I open it.

I immediately close any site that does this - don't care what they are offering/selling - if they behave this way, I guarantee their wares aren't worth bothering with.

It's almost like looking at code, I generally only have to look at the formatting. You don't see a lot of lame code that's impeccably formatted (nor a lot of useful websites that do that in-your-face type of advertising).

Sdtimes is worth clicking on a close button.

Note: you must use Intel VT or AMD-V enabled CPUs for this. Opterons that have only 3 digits in their model number won't work (such as 275, 880, etc), those with 4 digits (2220, 8218, etc) will.

(edit: looks like non-Windows guest OSes can only be allocated 1 virtual CPU; for me that is a deal-killer.)

If you want to run non-windows guest OS's then why us Windows as the host/hypervisor?

If you were a 99% Windows shop but wanted a linux-based DNS, mediawiki, subversion or similar server would be one case. (Host mostly Windows guests, but a small number of non-Windows.)

In which case you would have windows server machines that could run VirtualPC/VMware/Virtualbox.

The only 'point' of this article is that you can distribute a free windows base image.

First time I stumbled upon this version of Windows about half a year ago. I actually installed it on one of my laptops. When it's BOOTed, the "GUI" is pretty much like in Safe-Mode, only in full display resolution, i.e. a blue background and a console window. I don't remember exactly, but it was missing a lot of libraries.. so I couldn't actually install much software. Though, I'm sure it's possible to install all the missing libraries via Microsoft's website.

It's likely programs and libraries will refuse to work and complain they were not designed to run under your operating system.

Reading this description reminded me of Novel Netware's plain text dialog interface.

Hey, that's enough to boot and run apps. Also, if you diddle the image with one of MS's tools, you can jam a gui into it, in theory.

If that's the case, one could produce a tool that includes the image and "patches" it after installation, creating a free GUIfied windows.

Could you install KDE4 on top - that might actually be a very good way to get a clean KDE4 over MS Windows if it works; http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows.

Great. You would get a KDE desktop without the Unix part on top of the famously solid Windows kernel. What could possibly go wrong?

Lol. I'm assuming someone wants to do it, someone working on KDE, ...

To be fair, you could put a Unix-like lipstick on Windows with Cygwin. It will not change the underlying OS nature, but it will have lipstick on it.

Why would anyone want to do this?

I have no idea. Microsoft lost this former "solutions provider" (used to get the monthly crate-o-CDs) in the mid-90s with the anti-developer trifecta of:

- Executable registry entries

- Baking-In IE into the O.S. w/o any native ability (pre hypervisors) to concurrently run multiple versions for testing purposes

- Re-Authorization/Re-Licensing for trivial hardware changes (the whole WGA bullshit)

I've never heard of executable registry entries, and google is failing me when I try to find them. Can you link me to something about them?

I run a Linux desktop but would like to be able to run Windows apps in a Windows guest. I'm going to try to run this as a Windows guest and see if it works (using VirtualBox).

This isn't a guest environment of windows - this is a hypervisor - it runs on the bare metal (using virtualization features on new CPUs), hosting other operating systems.

This can't run windows apps as a windows guest.

I got downvoted for this? Seriously?

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