Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Introducing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008! 
(I’m late to write about this but better late than never)

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be a standalone version of Microsoft’s Hypervisor for hardware virtualization and is a head-to-head competitor with VMWare ESX Server, providing bare metal hypervisor-based server virtualization.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be downloadable in 30 days from Microsoft.com and it will be completely FREE.  It was originally slated to be available for purchase for $28 but on September 9th, it was announced that that fee would be waived and that anyone would be able to download and use our best and most powerful server virtualization technology for no charge. 

It’s my theory that Hyper-V Server 2008 would have shipped as a $28 product at launch had it not been for the fact that VMWare in an attempt to match Hyper-V, decided to suddenly make their ESX3i product free.  This marketing move of theirs effectively allowed us in the name of competition to make our product free, since we were simply matching their ‘pricing’.  So thanks VMWare!

IMPORTANT NOTE:  This is not to be confused with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V which is our server operating system that has Hyper-V as a feature, and of course has licensing that is required.  The Server OS of this product runs in a parent partition of a Hyper-V hypervisor and provides rich functionality for virtualization such as automated fail over, hot-add CPUs, & other high availability functions.

HYPER-V SERVER CHARACTERISTICS
Hyper-V Server 2008 provides basic OS functionality to boot up the server and by taking over responsibilities of the parent partition, it provides:

• Management APIs
• Memory management
• CPU cycle distribution, and other basic, bare-bones hypervisor functions. 

It is also has a series of restrictions on usage including a 4 physical processor maximum, 32GB RAM max, and a lack of clustering support.  As a result, Hyper-V Server 2008 makes sense as a technology predominantly used by:

• Hobbyists/Desktop/Laptop users who want a hypervisor on their personal systems
• Labs, test/dev environments, or shops that are cost averse & don’t require the robust features of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
• Companies looking to consolidate servers that own Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, or Linux – but not Windows Server 2008

Most Enterprise organizations will likely choose Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, however they now have a low risk, low investment choice.

LINK:   http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx