"It's Christmas day" for those waiting on Microsoft's first showing of virtualization
A quote from ADT article, titled Microsoft Releases Beta of Key Virtualization Product, says that
"Microsoft today made a surprise announcement that Hyper-V, code-named "Viridian," is available as a public beta with Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise edition. Originally, Hyper-V was scheduled to ship with the RTM version of Windows 2008 in Q1 of next year.
The initial version is restricted to the 64-bit version of Windows 2008, and is currently only available in an English-U.S. version. The final version of Hyper-V is expected to ship about 180 days after RTM, Microsoft has consistently stated."
Learn more about Hyper-V, and show your manager the video demo (a 57 second video showing a WS 2008 box running 5 servers that include WS2003 32bit and 64bit editions, WS2008 configured as a quad core, and Novell SuSE Enterprise 10).
The Hyper-V site also contains links to whitepapers, a webcast series, FAQ, TechNet info, and the team blog (good info, more videos).
Top Hyper-V Scenarios
- Server Consolidation
- Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Test and Development
- Dynamic Datacenter
Key Hyper-V Features
- Broad OS Support
- SMP Support
- Memory Support
- Improved Storage Access
- Network Load Balancing
- Hardware Sharing Architectures
- Quick Migration (not the same as Live Migration)
- Linux Integration Components
- Virtual Machine Snapshot
- Scalability
- Extensible - WMI, API's for 3rd party utilities and enhancements