Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Microsoft has released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. This is a separate standalone product and not to be confused with the Hyper-V role for Server 2008.

You can download it for free here!

This is very similar to Server 2008 Core with the Hyper-V role. Licensing is straight forward, you simply license any machines that you have running on the virtual server as you would a physical machine.

The main reason for choosing this over 2008 with Hyper-V, is that you don't need to purchase Server 2008, so you can get started straight away and virtualise your existing 2003 servers (or other OS's).

Click here to see a full comparison of the different versions of Hyper-V.

You will need an external machine running either Vista or 2008 to manage this machine. The hyper-v manager 32bit and 64bit only lets you create new machines from media and you will need a separate program such as VMM to convert existing machines.

We currently have 1 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 in production, running 2 exchange 2003 servers and a number of test servers. The reliability so far has been excellent.