The development team has just announced the availability of the RTM version of Hyper-V much earlier than the scheduled date, which was set to be 180 days after the RTM of Windows Server 2008 (end of August).

It’s now possible for everyone to use in-production Hyper-V RTM and to download bits from here.

As of July 8, Hyper-V RTM will also be available on Windows Update.

More than 250 customers who participated in the early adoption programs have actively contributed to the development of Hyper-V.

Here are just a few of those reported in the press:

Land O’Lakes
HotSchedules
The SCOOTER Store

Even Microsoft has already used in-production Hyper-V in particular to virtualize servers (currently a part) that run the sites TechNet (1 million hits per day), MSDN (3 million hits per day) and Microsoft.com (38 million hits per day, on average). The plans are to have Microsoft.com reach 50% on Hyper-V by the end of June.

Coinciding with the announcement of the RTM of Hyper-V, QLogic has published the results of some tests that measure the performance of disk access from virtual machines running on Hyper-V. The value reached is 180000 I/O per second, only 10% less than a physical server. I would say that this is a pretty good result.

Hyper-V Architecture

I have taken over this post that was made a year ago, relating to the architecture of Hyper-V and I transformed it into an article that you can download from here.

Supported Operating Systems

The operating systems listed below are supported by Microsoft in a Hyper-V-based virtual environment.

All operating systems listed are—or will soon be—available with an Integration Component, which will improve performance and integration with the stack virtualization operating system running in a virtual machine.

Operating System Servers


Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64
(VM with 1, 2 or 4 virtual processors)

Standard
Enterprise
Datacenter
HPC Server 2008
Web Server

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x86
(VM with 1, 2 or 4 virtual processors)

Standard
Enterprise
Datacenter
Web Server

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64
(VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)

R2 Standard with SP2
R2 Enterprise with SP2
R2 Datacenter with SP2
Standard with SP2
Enterprise with SP2
Datacenter with SP2

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x86
(VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)

R2 Standard with SP2
R2 Enterprise with SP2
R2 Datacenter with SP2
Standard with SP2
Enterprise with SP2
Datacenter with SP2
Web Edition with SP2

Microsoft Windows Server 2000
(VM with 1 virtual processor)

Server with SP4
Advanced Server with SP4
Linux Distributions
(VM with 1 virtual processor)

Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 x86
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 x64
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 x86
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 x64

Operating System Clients

Microsoft Windows Vista x64
(VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)

Business with SP1
Enterprise with SP1
Ultimate with SP1

Microsoft Windows Vista x86
(VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)

Business with SP1
Enterprise with SP1
Ultimate with SP1

Microsof Windows XP x64
(VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)

Professional with SP2

Microsoft Windows XP x86

Professional with SP3 (VM with 1 or 2 virtual processors)
Professional with SP2 (VM with 1 virtual processor)

You can find complete information on supported operating systems on KB954958.

Use and maintenance of a virtualized environment

If you are considering virtualization to simplify and improve your IT infrastructure, you can use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.1 Beta to identify the servers that lend themselves most to transfer from a physical environment to a virtual environment.

If you need to buy new hardware for host virtualization, you can choose between 240 certified servers listed in the Windows Server Catalog.

Once you have identified the server that you want to virtualize, the migration from physical to virtual (P2V) can be achieved using the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

If the operating system you want to virtualize supports VSS, migration can be done “hot”; in other words, without switching off the physical machine during the migration process.

The ideas and content in this article were highly inspired by Giorgio.