Ben's Quarters adventures in application development ...

The advances in VM technology for both client and server operating systems is obviously a great thing.  It saves money, time and makes life much easier when you can just copy an image to a different machine, make backup copies of an image and go back to an old image in a very small amount of time.  It's great too for having software testing environments.

One significant downside to this technology is going to be the amount of legacy software that will stick around.  By software, I mean operating systems and applications.  Upgrading or moving to a different OS or app is always a hassle.  However, one common opportunity when switching to a newer OS or app makes sense is when replacing old hardware.  Before VMs entered the scene, you might traditionally buy a new workstation or server every 4 years, for example.  A new machine means re-installing the OS and applications.  What a perfect opportunity to start off the new machine by installing the latest OS and applications.

With VM technology, when a physical machine needs to be replaced, if the OS on it is already a VM, you just copy that VM to the new hardware.  Even if the old system isn't a VM, no problem.  There's tools available to create a VM from a physical instance of an OS.  Once the old physical instance of an OS is a VM, you just copy that VM over to the new hardware.  So you end up with a brand new machine, but the old OS and old applications are still running on that machine.

For software companies, this means their customers may demand they support older versions of their software for a longer period.  When building new versions of software, it may also be necessary to include support for older operating systems based on the number of existing or potential customers who are still running an old OS.

A client of mine just recently needed to replace their 8 year old server.  It's a Windows 2000 terminal server that several employees work out of.  I've convinced some of the employees to start using Firefox, but others are still stuck on IE6.  The client ended up converting the physical Win2K server to a virtual server and copied that over to the new hardware.  Ack!  There's that growing movement in the community to persuade people to get off IE6.  I think the statistics show the percentage of IE6 users out there is still in the 15% - 25% range.  That's much too high a demographic to desert and not support when building a website.  Unfortunately, IE7/IE8 isn't available for Windows 2000.  For this particular client, I just need to convince everyone there to start using Firefox.  Maybe I can just hide the IE6 icon on their desktops :)

IE6 is a classic example of software you want everyone to get off of, and bury as deep as possible.  It's definitely not the only software out there that should be moved away from as newer versions of subpar software are released.  This increase in legacy software still being used out there is one of the few downsides to this overall great virtualization technology.

Beta 1 for Windows 7 was just released last week.  I haven't downloaded it, but happened to catch this blog post from the Windows team on Windows 7.  The official name for the next version of Windows will be Windows 7.  This name obviously came from the fact that the internal version number of this release of Windows would be version 7.0.  Windows 2000 is 5.0, XP is 5.1, Vista is 6.0, and this next one will be 7.0, hence the name Windows 7.  Apparently not!  The RTM version of Windows 7 will have an internal version number of 6.1.

Microsoft's reasoning for this boils down to maximizing application compatibility.  Programs and drivers that require themselves to be run on a build of Windows with a major version of 6 (or sometimes less) would continue to run on Windows 7 which will still have a major version of 6.  Yet, I thought Microsoft's been saying Windows 7 is a brand new operating system, and not just a more stable or improved version of Vista?!  Many have suggested the name for the upcoming OS should just be Vista SE, as in second edition.  Not a bad idea, actually!

I'm perplexed to understand the situation.  I can already see this versioning issue causing confusion by users trying to troubleshoot OS and application software issues on forums and other support channels.  The reason a major build number exists is to differentiate between major builds of software.  Although Windows 7 is looking a lot like a less resource hungry version of Vista, there's still the whole new touch screen functionality being added and early reports of Windows 7 Beta 1 show that some people are experiencing crashes in Beta 1.  Being just Beta 1, crashes are expected, but if Windows 7 was just a more solid Vista with some minor enhancements, then I wouldn't expect any crashes, nor would I expect it to take 10+ months from this Beta 1 release until Windows 7 RTM's at the end of 2009 or early 2010.

From my point of view, it's quite evident there's enough changes going on in this upcoming release of Windows that an increment in the major build number should be made.  Although Microsoft is trying to maximize application compatibility by keeping Windows 7's major build number at 6, I wouldn't be surprised if there will be some applications that allow themselves to run or be installed on Windows 7 because the major build number is 6, but crash or operate incorrectly because of differences in Windows 7 and Vista.  I can only assume the version of Windows that will have an internal build number of 7.0 is going to be the next major release after Windows 7.  What a needlessly confusing situation!