I feel bad that I didn’t include this yesterday – because it’s hugely important: Alongside of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 release candidates, Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server 2012 release candidate was also made publically available for download.
“What’s so cool about that, Kevin?”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Hyper-V Server is the free
“Free?!”
Yes, free operating system that.. well, I hesitate to call an operating system. It is Hyper-V in its purest form.. just the “micro-kernalized hypervisor” that you can run for virtualization hosts.
“Ah.. so it’s free, which means it’s a slim subset of capabilities of the Hyper-V that’s in Windows Server, right?”
Wrong. It’s every top-notch feature that exists even in Hyper-V in Windows Server Datacenter edition. Full failover cluster support. Full support of Live Migrations. And now in Hyper-V 2012 there are even more amazing features for high availability, disaster recovery (Replication, anyone?), network virtualization, and scale scale scale.
“What kind of scale? And how does it compare to VMware?”
Read this excellent blog post by Thomas Maurer, where he compares the Release Candidate version of Hyper-V to previous releases, as well as to current releases of VMware products.
Can you say “64 virtual procs in a VM”? I knew you could.
Absolutely Full of I.T. 
Hey, I have one of those can's of Hyper-V!
Someday I'll have the hardware at home to run this virtualization goodness. And Windows Server 2012. 🙂
LikeLike
Do you really have that can? Very cool.
LikeLike