Leaked Windows 8 M2 Wallpaper

A few months ago, I posted an article speculating that Microsoft may be building Windows 8 as an entirely virtualized OS.

Today, I read with some interest, a post on Windows8Center.com quoting a report on Win7China’s site that Windows 8 builds are currently installing in around 8 minutes and that restoring the OS to factory defaults can be done in less than 2 minutes!

A clean OS install in 8 minutes? Seriously? Wow!

A clean-installation of Windows 7 (on my crazy-fast Sony Vaio Z Series) takes just under 20 minutes. On machines with spinning disks, the fastest I’ve seen Win7 install (from USB stick) is 25-30 mins. Installing a major new OS in 8 minutes on spinning disks is staggeringly fast.

So, is this smoke and mirrors or is this possible and how might Microsoft make something like this happen?

Hierarchical Virtual Machines

Let’s imagine for a moment that Microsoft have created Windows 8 as a virtualized OS that runs as a guest OS atop a new host OS, using differencing disks to record changes made to the OS.

This isn’t rocket science – it’s how many of us manage our existing systems using Virtual Machine tools today:

1. Install the host OS
2. Install any virtualization software (e.g. VirtualPC, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMWare, etc)
3. Create new VM for new guest OS.
4. Install guest OS into VM
5. Fully patch & update guest OS
6. Install any additional tools you want in EVERY subsequent version of that OS.
7. Prepare OS for duplication (run “Sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown” for Windows)
8. Mark the base VHD as read-only/immutable (refer to your VM tool’s docs)
9. Create new VM with a new differencing disk using the the base VHD as the base image.

If you want, you can chain one base VHD to another to create, for example, VM’s based on Office & Productivity and separate VM’s for corporate, personal and OSS development – each installed with the tools necessary for each role. This is particularly useful when building or building with … ahem … bleeding-edge, somewhat unfinished tools

Employing this strategy means you can save hundreds of GB of storage space (since you only need one copy of each base OS) and, more importantly, can now create new OS installations in just a few minutes. If you want to destroy an OS image, just trash the VM, re-create it from whichever base you want and you’re up and running again in minutes, not -hours.

A new Hyper-V?

Now imagine if Microsoft have created Windows 8 to employ a very similar strategy systemically:

The host OS & kernel might be running an enhanced version of Hyper-V, fully abstracting the host machine’s architecture, hardware, devices and capabilities.

One might register base VHD’s for OS such as XP, Win7, Linux, etc. and create VM’s on the fly in just a few minutes since all the bits are already on disk and are already specialized to the virtual machine’s configuration. No more complex per-OS driver installation mechanism required – just lay down a new Hyper-V specialized VHD and you’re ready to go.

If Microsoft have gone even part of the way towards a world like this, they could well be about to introduce the most fundamental and powerful improvement to Windows since the move from DOS/Win95 to Windows NT-based OS.

Source: Win7China (Translated into English) via Windows8Center.