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Today, Microsoft announced that Hyper-V, the virtualization hypervisor for Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing. Customers are supposed to be able to grab the final version at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V, but that page doesn’t seem to have been updated just yet. Hyper-V will appear on Windows Update for Windows Server 2008 users starting July 8.
It’s been a long hard road to Hyper-V for Microsoft’s virtualization team what with schedule slips and feature cuts, but now they get to step into the ring with the heavyweights at VMware. Still, they have one big thing going for them: Hyper-V is effectively free so it may well draw the customers for whom it is “good enough.”
The final version details for Windows Server 2008 were revealed today at the Microsoft TechEd IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona by Bob Kelly, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing. To anyone familiar with Microsoft’s past server operating systems, there isn’t much that’s particularly novel except in regard to the new Viridian virtualization capability which has now been formally named Hyper-V:
Microsoft’s Viridian virtualization software (aka Windows Server virtualization) that was supposed to be built into Windows Server 2008 is late and feature short, but Microsoft seems to be doing their best to bluff the other players at the VMworld conference today:
Today Microsoft promised that a beta of Viridian, the free Windows Server virtualization facility accompanying Windows Longhorn Server, will be available when Longhorn is released to manufacturing. Unfortunately however, along the way to making the recently delayed promised release of Viridian within 180 days of Longhorn, some features had to be cut. Mike Neil, Microsoft’s GM of virtualization strategy, has the details at the Windows Server Division Weblog:
So we are making the following changes, and postponing these features to a future release of Windows Server virtualization:
- No Live migration
- No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor)
- Support limit of 16 cores/logical processors (e.g., 2 processor, quad-core systems is 8 cores; or 4 processor, quad-core system is 16 cores)
I wanted to share this information this week with partners and customers so that no one is surprised at WinHEC when we demo all the other innovations in Windows Server virtualization.
I doubt that the lack of these features is a catastrophe, but the delay of previously promised features makes Viridian seem a less than top rank offering. Moreover, while it will still be usable for garden variety server consolidation, the lack of live migration means that Viridian cannot be used for state of the art workload switching configurations as can offerings from competitors VMware and XenSource.
