Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server 2008

By Davey Winder
Tuesday, 09 September 2008 01:26

Technology

Microsoft wants you to 'Get Virtual Now' and in order to help things along will let you have a copy of Hyper-V Server 2008 absolutely free...

Microsoft decided to kick off the US leg of a global series of events under the banner of 'Get Virtual Now' today. Hoping to reach in excess of a quarter of a million customers, Microsoft Corp is giving virtualisation a push.

Designed to educate IT professionals on Microsoft virtualisation products, deployment tools and partner solutions, the Get Virtual Now series started last month in South Africa and has now reached the U.S.

By early 2009, Microsoft will have covered more than 50 other countries. In attendance were companies including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun Microsystems.

As well as announcing the upcoming availability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft Application Virtualisation 4.5, Microsoft also revealed that the new Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be available as a no-cost download within 30 days.

Hyper-V Server 2008 is a hypervisor-based server virtualisation product that promises a simplified, and according to Microsoft reliable, virtualisation solution to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server.

The next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server will come complete with live migration capabilities, but Microsoft also demonstrated a live migration feature for Windows Server 2008 R2 for the first time.

Utilising the integrated hypervisor technology and high-availability features of the server operating system, Microsoft demonstrated how customers can move running applications between servers to accommodate changing, dynamic computing needs across a data center.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will also be released within 30 days, enabling customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtualised infrastructure. This whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.

Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing within Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business commented that “now is the time for customers to get virtual... customers are adopting Microsoft solutions because they have better value and will make IT operations more dynamic."