Microsoft has decided against enhancing its Services for Unix (SFU) product and will not release any new versions of it going forward, according to company officials.

SFU is a Unix environment designed to run on top of the Windows kernel. It includes hundreds of Unix utilities, scripting shells and other Unix services.

Microsoft has decided to nix any future, out-of-band releases of SFU, Microsoft officials confirmed earlier this week.

Until recently, Microsoft had been expected to release a "Services for Unix 'Next'" version, which company officials had been hoping to ship in calendar 2005. This release, the follow-on to the currently shipping SFU 3.5 product, was set to deliver support for botoh x64- and Itanium-based hardware.

Microsoft will continue to support SFU 3.5 until 2011, and to offer extended support for the product until 2014, however.

"There will be no additional releases of SFU," said Samm DiStasio, director of product management with Microsoft's Windows Server division. "Customer feedback to us was that they wanted tighter integration of this sort of functionality with the operating system.

"Having Unix interoperability functionality integrated in to the OS (operating system) helps customers to programmatically access Windows and Unix resources at the same time, which is super important and something that couldn't be done with the previous architecture," DiStasio continued. "It needs to be part of OS development to ensure it works this way. Customers can use APIs (application programming interfaces) from both worlds, and continue to mature/evolve their apps. In R2, this functionality has been re-architected and in some cases completely re-designed in such a way that it will improve customer experience and integration."

Microsoft officials confirmed last month that Microsoft is moving ahead with plans to fold some SFU technologies into Windows Server 2003 R2.
Specifically, Microsoft is making available as part of R2 the next generations of NFS client, NFS Server, User/Name mapping, Telnet server and client, password sync and the NIS Server components of SFU.

Microsoft also is making available some related technologies, including a subsystem for Unix-based applications, designed to allow the recompiling of Unix applications on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows releases. This subsystem is not part of SFU 3.5.

SFU 3.5 is a downloadable subsystem that runs on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems.

Microsoft officials said to expect the integrated SFU technology to be available in all versions of Windows Server 2003 R2.

R2 is a fairly minor version of Windows Server, built on the recently released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) code base. R2 integrates a number of the myriad Windows Server 2003 feature packs that Microsoft has shipped since April 2003, plus adds a few new features. Among the new features slated for inclusion in R2: a new file migration toolkit; simple-SAN management tools; a new storage-resource-management subsystem (code-named "Corral") and centralized file and print management facilities.

The R2 release, a first release candidate of which Microsoft rolled out earlier this week, is slated to ship by the end of calendar 2005.

This story was updated to include Microsoft comments on Thursday.