Windows 8: Virtualized operating system away from hardware

How Microsoft designed the Windows 8 architecture is evident. This document comes from the Microsoft Architecture Summit held in London in April this year. The content of the conference is mainly about virtualization. In one of the slides, Microsoft mentioned the "next-generation Windows" in 2012, which is now Windows 8 in Microsoft's mouth, and the content is the virtualization of Windows clients.

Microsoft named this architecture slide as "Desktop as a Service (DaaS)", describing the current consumer issues and further needs when using Windows. How to solve these problems and meet the ever-changing needs of users? Virtualization technology!

Microsoft has provided a large number of virtualization technologies, including virtual desktop architecture (VDI), application virtualization (App-V, MED-V, Remote Apps Remote Application, Terminal Server Terminal Server, Operating System Virtualization (Remote Desktop, Terminal Services, VDI), Data Virtualization (Folder Redirection and Synchronization), Hardware Virtualization (Hyper-V), There are also various system center management software.

Although many people think that VDI is an excellent virtualization solution, Microsoft believes that VDI and desktop as a service (DaaS) are not the same. DaaS is not just VDI, so the next generation of virtualization What exactly is the desktop?

Virtual desktop

According to Microsoft's description, in the new DaaS In the world, “the desktop should exist out of the device, and the desktop can be seen as an entry point to access user applications, data, user state, authorization, and usage. & rdquo;

DaaS means that applications and data are treated as cached entity objects and synchronized with an application store. In this new mode, the operating system is also cached and synchronized to the application. Program store.

In theory, hardware failures are no longer a problem for Windows 8 users.

In the following file, we can see more clearly how Microsoft plans to develop and target Windows 8:

on Windows XP In Vista, Microsoft implemented virtualization of user data and user settings; to Windows 7, the system virtualized user data, settings, and applications by using App-V; in the next generation of Windows, Microsoft will pass local Virtual Disk (VHD) to virtualize the operating system.