Announcement: Windows Server virtualization “Preview” release is available.

Update June 2008. WSv is now known as Hyper-V and is available in RTM form (KB950050). The post below refers to pre-release software.

Windows Server virtualization, (which I’ll generally refer to as WSv for short), is the Hypervisor-based Virtual Machine technology available as a role in Windows Server 2008. WSv will be available in RTM (Release to Manufacture) form within 180 days of the RTM of Windows Server 2008.

However, our “Preview” release is available today, in-box, as part of Windows Server 2008 RC0. We will be shipping a Beta release in the not too distant future. More on Beta another day, but for now, let’s concentrate on Preview. Hopefully it’s self explanatory that the term “Preview” implies that there are a few features not available, it is not Beta quality, it is not suitable for production deployment and, of course, there are improvements yet to come in the pipeline.

A quick summary of some of the big features of WSv, all of which are available in this release:
- 64 bit support for guest operating systems
- Support for > 3.6GB memory  in guest operating systems
- Multi-processor support in guest operating systems
- Snapshotting
- Passthrough disk access

I’ll put up a post walking through how to install WSv very soon. In the meantime, a few links for you:

Presspass article announcing Windows Server 2008 RC0
Channel 9 interview with Jeff Woolsey and Alex Hinrichs
Windows Server 2008 home page
Microsoft Virtualization home page

and the most important one: Download It Here 

Cheers,
John.

[Update 7:55PM PST - just gone live on MSDN subscriber downloads.....]