Most of you are probably already familiar with “Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V”, in which Hyper-V can be added as a “role” to the Windows Services. This product has been released for a few months now.

What many of you are not familiar with is “Microsoft Hyper-V”, which is a standalone Hypervisor that installs on bare metal servers without the need for Windows Server 2008. This product is dedicated OS, just for hosting Virtual Machines and will be available around the first part of November as a free download. You can manage a Microsoft Hyper-V server in a few different ways: 1) You can perform basic management from the Microsoft Hyper-V Server itself. 2) Manage it remotely by connecting to the Microsoft Hyper-V Server from a Windows Server 2008 server that has the Hyper-V role installed. 3) Perform advanced management and provisioning using System Center
Virtual Machine Manager (Workgroup or Enterprise Edition).

See the “First Look at Microsoft Hyper-V” video.

If you want to see what coming in the next version of Hyper-V, check out the video “Demo: Hyper-V Server and Live Migration”. This next version with Live Migration capabilities will likely be released the same time Windows Server 2008 R2 is - two years after Windows Server 2008 general availability according to the Product Group’s timeline.