Microsoft announced the release of Hyper-V Server 2008 today via a blog post on the Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog (man, is that a mouthful!). Available “later today” as a free download, Hyper-V Server is Microsoft’s “bare metal” hypervisor-based virtualization product. Although the blog post said later today, I tried downloading it right away anyway, but the download link apparently doesn’t yet work.
<aside>I don’t know that it can really be called a “bare metal” virtualization solution since it still does require Windows Server 2008, albeit a heavily stripped-down version, in the parent partition in order to provide I/O drivers.</aside>
Hyper-V Server 2008 can be downloaded here.
Technical resources for Hyper-V Server 2008 can be found here.
Tags: HyperV, Microsoft, Virtualization, Windows
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Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Jon B
Scott and others, check out this comparison of the install of Bare Metal Hyper-V and ESXi side by side.
http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/resources/esxi-hyper-v-installation.html
…and no I don’t work for VmWare. =)
Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Stu Fox
Just to be clear, that comparison is of Hyper-V, not Hyper-V Server. Hyper-V is the version that is Windows Server 2008, and Hyper-V Server is the standalone product.
And to answer your point Scott, it is indeed a bare metal (or type 1) hypervisor that runs on the bare metal. It does not incur any of the overheard of a “hosted” or type 2 hypervisor because of this. The fact that the parent partition (itself a VM) runs Windows Server 2008 does not change the bare-metalness of the hypervisor.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft NZ, but this is not an official response on behalf of my employer.
Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 10:16 pm
slowe
Stu,
Strictly speaking, you are absolutely correct–thank you for pointing that out. A “Type 1″ hypervisor does not incur the overhead of a hosted hypervisor such as that used by Virtual Server or VMware Server.
I guess my comments lean more toward the absolute dependence of the hypervisor upon the parent partition. This is an architectural decision embraced by Hyper-V and Xen but eschewed by VMware. We could get into a deep religious debate over which architecture is better (placing the I/O stack in the parent partition or embedding them inside the hypervisor), but it just seems logical to me that a hypervisor which is dependent upon an OS–even if it is a stripped down OS–is somehow less “bare metal” than a hypervisor that isn’t. Does that make sense? Like I said, I’m not trying to stir up the religious debate here, rather just calling it like I see it.
Thanks for your comments, Stu.