Microsoft releases Hyper-V beta 'early'

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 14 December 2007 10:44

Opinion and Analysis

The beta of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualisation technology, has come early in what Microsoft calls a ‘holiday surprise’, although VMware says they’re five years late.
Expected in the first quarter of 2008 alongside the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has launched their Hyper-V as beta software two or three months early, hoping to gain a much wider pool of valuable feedback to improve the software, then likely ship an RC1 before the final version.

Hyper-V is due to arrive with “180 days” or around 6 months after the RTM of Windows Server 2008, and must be run with the current release candidate of Windows Server 2008, so there’s still plenty of testing and fine tuning for developers to come in the quest to deliver a solid, stable version RTM product, with the inevitable improvements, updates and security fixes to come after that.

Rather than leave users with the September 2007 ‘Community Preview’ of the Hyper-V technology, Microsoft clearly believes Hyper-V has been improved enough to be classed as a beta, showing progress has been made, and presumably continue working on improving the software as rapidly as possible as feedback comes from Microsoft’s error reporting systems and starts arriving in steadily growing volume.

The Hyper-V beta is much improved, according to Microsoft’s Hyper-V website, offering a raft of new features that sound impressive for those running server farms and data centres, although in response to the Microsoft threat, Information Week has quoted VMware's Bogomil Balkansky, the senior director of product marketing, saying that: “We've been selling products since 2001 Microsoft is shipping in beta something that represented the state of the art five years ago.”
 
That said, no-one would be using Hyper-V in a production environment at the moment, given its brand new beta status, where problems are expected to occur. Most virtualisation customers are either using market leader VMware, growing competitor Xen (recently purchased by Citrix), Parallels (formely SWsoft and most famous for Parallels Desktop for Mac),  Microsoft’s Virtual PC, Sun, Microsoft and also Novell, depending on whether they’re running servers, consumer desktops and notebooks, Windows, Linux or Macs.

Information Week also quotes analysts saying that only 5% of the server market has been virtualised so far, showing how large the market and the market opportunity still is. This has placed VMware in the position of facing a raft of customers, some of whom are or could in the future offer their software free as part of their operating system offering.

Free products affect your income stream, so if you’re still going to charge money, you need to out innovate your competition. So far, VMware’s recent moves into being partially built into server hardware and the sheer superiority of their server virtualisation software show that their multi-year lead is pushing virtualisation into new directions, while giving competitors plenty of ideas to copy.

So, what next for virtualisation? Please read on to continue...