Microsoft Reaches Virtualization Milestone With Release Candidate of Hyper-V By VSM News Staff published: Wednesday, March 19 2008
Feature-complete version of Windows Server 2008
virtualization technology made broadly available to customers and partners.
REDMOND, Wash. - March 19, 2008 - Reaching the next major milestone in
virtualization development, Microsoft Corp. today made broadly available a
feature-complete release candidate of Microsoft Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based
virtualization software available with various versions of Windows Server 2008.
A beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 when it launched last
month, and this release candidate provides updated, near-final code.
Hyper-V provides customers with efficient and cost-effective virtualization
infrastructure software. It enables customers to reduce operating costs by
increasing hardware utilization, optimizing infrastructure and improving server
availability. Customers and partners can download the release candidate here by
10 a.m. PDT today.
"As customers begin deploying Windows Server 2008, we want to ensure they
have the tools to optimize their IT infrastructure. Hyper-V will help customers
consolidate IT systems and allow their businesses to respond more rapidly to
ever-changing market conditions," said Bill Hilf, general manager of the Windows
Server Division at Microsoft. "Virtualization has been too complicated and
expensive for most organizations, which is why less than 10 percent of servers
are virtualized today. Our goal is to make Hyper-V broadly available, easy to
adopt and cost-effective while delivering powerful systems management
capabilities for customers' traditional and virtualized IT environments."
Customers who started evaluating Hyper-V during the beta process in December
2007 and as part of their Windows Server 2008 installation are already
experiencing more flexible IT systems, greater control, increased business
agility and higher performance.
"Hyper-V is a thinner, more optimized virtualization technology than we've
seen from other vendors, and we look forward to improving server utilization and
better managing our datacenter, especially in a clustered environment," said
Jason Nord, server engineer at Land O'Lakes Inc. "While evaluating Hyper-V,
we've found it offers better support for running simultaneous operating systems,
which helps us consolidate our applications that run on a variety of older
software and servers."
Microsoft is working with partners to help them plan, build and test their
own offerings built on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to address broad customer
needs and expand and enhance the platform capabilities.
"Surgient has seen growing customer interest in adding support for Windows
Server 2008 and Hyper-V to our virtual lab management software so that our
mutual customers can streamline application life cycle operations, reducing
capital and operating expenses," said Tim Lucas, president and CEO of Surgient
Inc. "Our customers need to be able to replicate production application
configurations in virtual labs using any virtual or physical infrastructure.
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V delivers in all these areas, and we're excited to
add support for it to our virtual lab management platform."
Hardware industry partners including AMD, Dell Inc., Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens
Computers, Hitachi Ltd., HP, Intel Corporation, IBM Corp., NEC Corp. and Unisys
Corp. are also working with Microsoft to test and evaluate Hyper-V. Once final
code is available, these partners plan to integrate support for Hyper-V into
their virtualization offerings in ways that best fit their business, including
pre-installation on servers, device support, solutions and services. These
partnerships will further lower barriers for customers as they adopt
virtualization solutions, making it easier to incorporate virtualization into
their server infrastructures.
The release candidate features an expanded list of tested and qualified guest
operating systems, which now includes Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2),
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.
Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit (x64)
versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter, with
English, German and Japanese language options available as well as enablement of
Hyper-V on international locales, and further language options and support
available in the final release. In addition, the release candidate comes with
support for more hardware configurations and offers improved performance and
scalability. It also includes the option for installing Hyper-V Manager
Microsoft Management Console on Windows Vista SP1 for remote management.
Deployment and management capabilities are essential when building a scalable
virtualization infrastructure. With the Microsoft System Center suite and the
next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, available in the second
half of 2008, customers can seamlessly manage their physical and virtual servers
with a single set of consistent, compatible tools. Customers will be able to
rapidly provision and configure new virtual machines and centrally manage their
virtual infrastructure, regardless of whether they are running on Hyper-V,
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, VMware ESX Server or VMware Infrastructure 3.
A future release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager will also add support
for the Xen hypervisor.
The final version of Hyper-V remains on target for release by August 2008,
which aligns with the previously stated timing for delivery within 180 days of
the Windows Server 2008 release to manufacturing. More information about Windows
Server 2008 Hyper-V is available here ,
and more details about the Hyper-V release candidate can be found on TechNet
blogs .
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their
full potential.
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