News

Microsoft, Canonical Partner on Hypervisor for Containers

The new hypervisor isn't for apps, breaking from the traditional model.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 08/17/2015

Hyper-V, of course, is Microsoft's bread-and-butter hypervisor. But as hypervisors evolve, Microsoft is looking at ways to combine them with containers to further push the boundaries of what's possible in the datacenter and cloud.

Ben Armstrong, Microsoft's Hyper-V and virtualization guru, will outline the company's participation in two open source projects: the Canonical-backed Linux Container LXD hypervisor project and OpenStack. Armstrong said that he'd be speaking at ContainerCon 2015, a Linux Foundation event, and at OpenStack Day. Both will be taking place on Microsoft's home turf of Seattle.

As reported by ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Microsoft and Canonical, the parent company that distributes Ubuntu Linux, are working together on LXD, a project to develop Linux container hypervisors. As part of the project, Canonical last year revealed the specs for Linux Containers, or LXC, which is a new stratum on top of LXC that endows the advantages of a traditional hypervisor into the faster, more efficient world of containers," noted Dustin Kirkland, a member of Ubuntu's product and strategy team, in a blog post yesterday.  "Hosts running LXD are handily federated into clusters of container hypervisors, and can work as Nova Compute nodes in OpenStack, for example, delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud technology at lower costs and greater speeds."

Microsoft has openly embraced Linux containers with its collaboration with Docker; for example, the two are among others working on the Open Container Initiative, so the collaboration on LXC and Canonical appears to be a natural evolution of that work. In a quote from Kirkland's post, Microsoft's Armstrong, whose actual title is principal program manager lead at Microsoft on the core virtualization and container technologies, said that "Canonical's LXD project is providing a new way for people to look at and interact with container technologies. Utilizing 'system containers' to bring the advantages of container technology to the core of your cloud infrastructure is a great concept. We are looking forward to seeing the results of our engagement with Canonical in this space."

Meanwhile, Armstrong noted in his own MSDN blog post that he's scheduled to speak this week at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015, which is taking place in conjunction with ContainerCon. While Microsoft has been a silent player in OpenStack, Armstrong pointed out that the company's Nova and Open-vSwitch drivers for Hyper-V connect to Active Directory and Cinder drivers for Windows iSCSI.