Microsoft Corp has confirmed that it is working with Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc on a new virtualization hypervisor technology that will take it into competition with the Xen open source hypervisor. The company's CEO Steve Ballmer mooted plans for a hypervisor in April at the company's Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. "You'll see us introduce hypervisor technology around Windows, that is important," he said. "We have virtualization technology today, but really this notion of a smaller, thinner hypervisor and what that can mean is very important." Microsoft's corporate vice president of server and tools marketing and solutions, Andy Lees, told ComputerWire that the company is working with Intel and AMD on their respective VT and Pacifica processor-based virtualization technologies. "Virtualization today is used very much for develop and test, and much less in production," said Lees. "Having a hypervisor semi-hardware layered virtualization is the important step forward. Ultimately we will build a hypervisor working with Intel and AMD and do it at the operating system level." Microsoft already offers virtual machine technology with its Virtual Server 2005 product, which runs on top of Windows and supports Windows virtual machines, with Linux virtual machine support coming in the release of Service Pack 1 release later this year. The hypervisor technology will be embedded within Windows and enable it to take direct advantage of processor-level virtualization technologies that will improve the performance and efficiency of running virtual machines. Full Story At Source