Microsoft delivers Hyper-V virtualisation system ahead of schedule!

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 June 2008 05:00

Technology

It's a widely held belief that 'software project' and 'behind schedule' go together like fish and chips, but Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation product has arrived well inside the promised timeframe. The early arrival of Hyper-V may indicate how desperate Microsoft is to become a serious player in the rapidly growing virtualisation market, where it currently lags behind VMware.

VMware is thought to hold as much as 90 percent of the x86 virtualisation market, and last year Citrix acquired XenSource, a company that had commercialised the Xen open source hypervisor.

Hyper-V was promised within 180 days of Windows Server 2008. That was generally interpreted as meaning an August release, although there have been hints of early delivery.

"Customers who buy Windows Server 2008 are not only getting the scalability benefits, the high performance and reliability, and all the great things that Windows Server is known for; as of today they can benefit from integrated virtualization with Hyper-V," said Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy at Microsoft.

Hyper-V is a hypervisor, which sits between the hardware and one or more virtual machines. This is in contrast with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft's previous virtualisation product, which runs virtual machines under a host operating system.

Virtualisation allows workloads previously deployed across multiple servers to be consolidated onto a smaller number of more powerful systems, reducing the physical space required and usually reducing energy consumption.

In some cases, applications are put onto separate servers for stability reasons or to allow for peak loads. Virtualisation helps with both situations. Much better utilisation can be achieved by moving multiple light-load applications - each still running under its own operating system  - onto virtual machines hosted by a single server.

What happens when things get busy? Please read on.