Hyper-V Released

Today Microsoft released Hyper-V 1.0, their bare-metal hypervisor. I haven’t been able to find much information on the Internet about it yet other than Alessandro’s announcement and this article at Network World; there was nothing on the Microsoft web site about it at the time of this writing.

I’ve covered Hyper-V extensively in the last few weeks due to my Tech-Ed coverage, so I’ll refer readers back to some of the Hyper-V related sessions for more information on Hyper-V architecture, networking, security, or storage:

VIR367: Hyper-V Security and Best Practices
VIR250: Advanced Storage Connectivity for VMs
VIR358: Hyper-V Architecture, Scenarios, and Networking
Significant Networking Problem with Hyper-V
Hyper-V Clustering Scenarios
More on Hyper-V and NIC Teaming

The release of Hyper-V now opens the door for Microsoft’s System Center team to finalize Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which I currently see as a notable competitive advantage over VMware due to VMM’s ability to manage both Hyper-V as well as VI3. There are a number of VMM 2008 posts available with more information also:

VIR253: Microsoft System Center VMM 2008, Part 1 of 2
VIR360: Microsoft System Center VMM 2008, Part 2 of 2
VIR350: System Center VMM Advanced Integration

The next few weeks will be interesting to watch; in particular, I’m interested to see what actions VMware will take to counter this new competitive threat.

UPDATE: Microsoft finally provided some URLs to their announcements:

Microsoft’s Hypervisor Technology Gives Customers Combined Benefits of Windows Server 2008 and Virtualization
It’s here! Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is available for download…