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Microsoft ships Hyper-V hypervisor


By David Worthington
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June 27, 2008 —  Microsoft has beaten its self-imposed deadline to ship Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization system.

The company released yesterday Hyper-V to manufacturing, over a month ahead of its August timetable, and made it available for download through both the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update. Customers that have already installed RC0 or RC1 release candidates of Hyper-V may update to the final version.

Hyper-V, formerly known as “Viridian,” can be used to test applications and plan future consolidation, business continuity and high-availability projects, according to Microsoft. It requires a host running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008, and specific server hardware features that enable virtualization and data execution protection.

It serves as a virtualization infrastructure for enterprises and works with a range of guest operating systems that includes the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, in addition to Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.

Microsoft intended for Hyper-V to ship with Windows Server 2008 in February, but experienced multiple delays with the hypervisor’s release date slipping due to undisclosed development problems.

Despite the delays, Microsoft’s timing is good in having beaten the delivery schedule, said Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group. Hyper-V meets the “good enough” threshold for certain workflows and situations, he added.

Hyper-V’s acceptance will be contingent upon whether organizations are satisfied with how well it can be managed, he believes.

It is central to the company’s virtualization strategy, where Windows is the host operating system, said Rob Enderle, founder of analysis firm Enderle Group, in an earlier interview.

As such, Hyper-V will be tightly wound into the Microsoft stack. It will be supported by Microsoft System Center Suite, the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, when it is expected to become available later this year.

Microsoft has lined up several third-party hardware and ISV partners to support Hyper-V, including Diskeeper, IBM and Symantec.

Wolf compared Hyper-V’s impact to a long-expected comet—one that Microsoft’s foes have known about and have had plenty of time to prepare for.

“They will come out swinging and not run and hide,” he said of Microsoft’s rivals, noting that market leader VMware has had a “huge head start” and has not slowed its rapid pace of development, making it extremely difficult for Microsoft to catch up.

Further, Hyper-V lacks important features that competitors  offer such as memory overcommit and live migration, said Wolf. “I expect that they will highlight those distinctions.”

Wolf anticipates that competitors will become more aggressive and do “interesting things” in their own right, including lowering their prices to block Microsoft’s avenue of penetration.




Related Search Term(s): Server management, virtualization, Microsoft


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