A Virtual Launch

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Well you go away for two short days and come back to a flurry of activity on the virtualization front!  In case, as was mine, you were too busy getting ready for Monday Night Football you might have missed the Hyper-V launch that happened on Monday where Microsoft announced....

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V live migration (UPDATE: See Video Below!)
  • Microsoft Application Virtualization (aka SoftGrid) v4.5 was released and will be included in MDOP 2008 R2
  • the availability of System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2008 which will allow you to manage Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V and ESX virtual hosts.  SCVMM 2008 will be available within 30 days! (Well 28 days because I am two days late in posting this)
  • the availability of Hyper-V Server in 30 days which will be available at NO COST!

Here is a video demo of Live Migration and you can find more demos in the Virtual Press Room.

Now you might be asking "What the heck is Hyper-V server?" so let's dig into this a bit.

Hyper-V Server, is a new hypervisor based virtualization offering.  It does one thing, run virtual machines, and not much else.  It was built to allow for a simple, reliable virtualization solution that has been optimized for the single task of running virtual machines.  Think Server Core, further stripped of the bits not needed for virtualizing machines.  It does integrate with all existing tools allowing it to be patched, monitored and managed with the same tools you use in your Windows environment.

Now you might have noticed that I called it Hyper-V Server and not Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Server or Windows Hyper-V Server.  That is because it is not really Windows.  Sure it shares some of the core architecture of Windows but it differs in a few ways and a few of these ways will save you money.  Since it is not Windows you don't need any CALs, in fact Hyper-V server will be completely free.  Download, install and away you go with your server consolidation project.  You can use the Hyper-V MMC (32bit or 64bit)to manage the server and it's VMs or leverage the System Centre suite of tools to manage and monitor it as well.

So back to this launch thing, don't worry, you didn't miss a thing.  You'll be able to learn a lot more about Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008 and Microsoft Application Virtualization in the virtualization track taking place at TechDays which you will here more about very soon.