http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/inetpub/kevinremde/KROmniture.htm
In today’s “31 Days of our Favorite Things” series, Matt Hester is giving away the store.
“Huh?”
Unlike our main competition in the area of virtualization and all things private cloud, Microsoft believes that virtualization is just a ubiquitous part of the datacenter today. And as such, it should be available and optionally installable as a part of our server platform that is Windows Server 2012. So.. everything you can do, and no matter how big you want to scale or be flexible on our virtualization platform, you can do with what is simply included in Windows Server.
Can you say “64 virtual procs in a single VM”? I knew you could.
How about handling up to 8000 virtual machines in failover cluster of 64 nodes? Or a no-additional-cost platform that does live migration, live storage migration, and even shared-nothing live migration (which is the LIVE move of a virtual machine between to virtualization hosts with no shared storage… just a network path between them. Yeah.. you heard me right. I move a VM from the C: drive of one Hyper-V host to the C: drive of another host, and the VM never goes down or loses connectivity)? I could go on and on.
But…
“Ah ha! There’s a catch!”
Hold on there, buckaroo. No catch. I was just going to say: But if you want all of that scale and all of those same capabilities supported by a FREE hypervisor without having to purchase Windows Server for the virtualization host OS, you can get it all in Hyper-V Server.
“But seriously.. your competition has a free hypervisor, too.”
Does their free hypervisor do everything that their top-of-line hypervisor does? Can you do every form of vMotion..er.. Live Migration imaginable with it? Or do they require you to buy their super-ultra-mega-enterpri$e-plu$ edition?
“Um..”
Exactly. Hyper-V Server is full-featured. Anything you can do with Hyper-V as a role on Windows Server 2012, you can do with Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
Make sure you CHECK OUT MATT’S ARTICLE on the subject. And then download the free Hyper-V Server and give it a try.
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Are you interested in this? Have any concerns or questions? That’s what the comments are for.
Absolutely Full of I.T. 
I wonder if it is possible to run this free Hyper-V hosts in a Hyper-V cluster without and AD Domain?
I got some old Quad core computer at home that I am thinking about using as lab enviroments and it would be nice to be able to do clustering aswell 🙂
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You are still required to have Active Directory when using Windows Failover Clustering; however, there are improvements to the initial start-up of the cluster services so that they will start up even if they don't initially see a domain. (That might be a fix to the Catch-22 of thinking that you could cluster your DC VMs, only to find out that the cluster wouldn't start up.) Check out the Failover Clustering documentation – and in particular the "what's new" area – on TechNet: technet.microsoft.com/…/hh831579.aspx
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