Microsoft Unleashes Hyper-V to the Virtualization Masses

Posted by Scott Delap on Jun 26, 2008 09:28 PM

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VMWare

Today Microsoft released Hyper-V, their entry into the bare metal hypervisor virtualization space. Hyper-V has been in development for over three years during which there have been a number of delays and feature cut backs including dropping live migration support. Version 1.0 includes:

• Support for 32 and 64 bit operating systems
• Support for 64GB of Ram
• Quick Migration (Suspend, Migrate, Startup)
• Linux Support (Via SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10)

Microsoft is eating their own dog food so to speak with the new release by migrating 25% of Microsoft.com to the new technology as of today. They have plans to increase the percentage it supports in the future. The current performance of the virtualization segment will allow the migration from 80 physical machines to 64 VM's running on 40 physical servers.

Industry coverage marks today as monumental from both a general perspective as well as for some of Microsoft's competitors. From GigaOm concern for Citrix:

...But Citrix and Microsoft have close enough ties that the move by Redmond into data center virtualization may be akin to your sister stealing your boyfriend. And that could strain their relationship. Industry players have claimed that Citrix may be ready to let Microsoft get away with the theft, and focus instead on the PC virtualization market...

Networkworld considers industry heavyweight VMWare:

...Both VMware and Microsoft have gaps in their management capabilities, but VMware seems to have an advantage of manageability [such as VMotion and DRS] that is built into their virtual infrastructure that is often the reason for their selection...

Finally CIO.com quotes a satisfied early adopter:

..."We run probably 300,000 transaction per day over our environment, with a little less than 300 (physical) hosts and about 1600 on Virtual Server," Steffen says. "About 100 of those are running Hyper-V and they're completely solid. It's hard to say how much of an improvement [Hyper-V is compared to Virtual Server], but at this point we're seeing something like a 15 to 20 percent lift."...

InfoQ will continue to provide coverage of Hyper-V in our Virtualization section in the future.

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