Microsoft Releases Hyper-V Hypervisor
For the second time in a week, Microsoft said a version of its software is ready sooner than expected. On Thursday, the software maker made available a beta version of its Hyper-V hypervisor technology, a release that had been scheduled for early next year.
Microsoft didn’t change its timing for the final release of the technology, which is due to ship within 180 days of the release of Windows Server 2008. (That product is slated to be wrapped up ahead of its formal launch on February 27.)
“Delivering the high-quality Hyper-V beta earlier than expected allows our customers and partners to begin evaluating this feature of Windows Server 2008 and provide us with valuable feedback” said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division, in a prepared statement.
By issuing Hyper-V in a beta version early and certifying it as “high quality,” Microsoft is sending a signal that it may not be as far behind in virtualization technology as it sometimes appears. The sooner it can get its hypervisor into the hands of developers, the sooner it can start competing for mindshare with market leader VMware and its ESX Hypervisor.
Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, Oakland, Calif., has been using Hyper-V for about four months and has been “extremely pleased” with what Microsoft has delivered.
“The beta has been very stable, and we’ve been able to take old Virtual Server 2005 and Virtual PC images and just ‘boot them up’ on Hyper-V. All of our previous Virtual Server 2005 images and demo images moved right across,” said Morimoto. “Hyper-V now supports 64-bit guest images, so now all of the 64-bit apps are working in virtual spaces.”
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