"It's Christmas day" for those waiting on Microsoft's first showing of virtualization

  • Article
A quote from ADT article, titled Microsoft Releases Beta of Key Virtualization Product, says that

"Microsoft today made a surprise announcement that Hyper-V, code-named "Viridian," is available as a public beta with Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise edition. Originally, Hyper-V was scheduled to ship with the RTM version of Windows 2008 in Q1 of next year.

The initial version is restricted to the 64-bit version of Windows 2008, and is currently only available in an English-U.S. version. The final version of Hyper-V is expected to ship about 180 days after RTM, Microsoft has consistently stated."

Learn more about Hyper-V, and show your manager the video demo (a 57 second video showing a WS 2008 box running 5 servers that include WS2003 32bit and 64bit editions, WS2008 configured as a quad core, and Novell SuSE Enterprise 10).

The Hyper-V site also contains links to whitepapers, a webcast series, FAQ, TechNet info, and the team blog (good info, more videos).

Top Hyper-V Scenarios

  • Server Consolidation
  • Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  • Test and Development
  • Dynamic Datacenter

Key Hyper-V Features

  • Broad OS Support
  • SMP Support
  • Memory Support
  • Improved Storage Access
  • Network Load Balancing
  • Hardware Sharing Architectures
  • Quick Migration (not the same as Live Migration)
  • Linux Integration Components
  • Virtual Machine Snapshot
  • Scalability
  • Extensible - WMI, API's for 3rd party utilities and enhancements