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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.”
Microsoft created the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in 2006 as a home for four acquired technologies including Softgrid’s application virtualization, but oddly delivered it only as a perk for System Assurance customers which as a rule are the larger enterprises. Apparently, Microsoft feels that the virtualization portion is the real draw and last week they announced that they are adding the desktop virtualization technologies they acquired with Kidaro and renaming MDOP as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization:
We’ve invested over $400 million in developing and expanding MDOP thus far, and I’m very excited to share with you that we have officially finalized the acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, whose products enable a seamless combination of applications running from within both a host and guest OS. This technology will help enable end users to run applications from multiple versions of Windows at the same time, with seamless windowing and menus, and without the confusion of logging into and seeing multiple virtual machine desktops. The product teams are working closely with our new colleagues from Kidaro to incorporate the desktop virtualization technologies into MDOP in the first half of 2009, under the new product name Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization. We will continue investing here because we know manageability is fundamental to broad corporate use of desktop virtualization.
We’ve sold over 6.5 million licenses of MDOP to date, making it the fastest-selling volume licensing product in Microsoft history. It’s worth noting that 60 percent of IT Pros who are familiar with MDOP have told us they intend to deploy MDOP within the next 12 months.
While all this is undoubtedly a technological tour de force, one can’t help wonder if the advent of Web apps with better quality user interfaces obviates the need for elaborate virtualization lashups to run desktop applications from multiple managed PCs. Still, there are plenty of legacy Windows apps, particularly in large enterprises, where Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MEDV) may still be the way to go at least for a while.
Microsoft is never shy about reaching for the wallet to buy technology and the associated developer talent to embellish their offerings and this week’s shopping cart holds Rapt Inc,, an advertising yield software developer, and Kidaro, a provider of desktop virtualization management software.
Today Microsoft is cranking up the hoopla for the 2008 refresh of their mainline server and tools products: Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Visual Studio 2008 is already generally available and SQL Server 2008 won’t ship until 3Q, but some there is some claim to relevancy for the launch event beyond the marketing hype since Windows Server 2008 became generally available today.
