For a change, Microsoft released the latest version of its
virtualization technology, Hyper-V, well before the most recently
“rescheduled” launch timeframe of early August.
Talking very excitedly about Hyper-V on the phone from the US in an
exclusive interaction with Network Computing, Mike Schutz, Director
of Windows Server and server tools business at Microsoft, said that
the new launch looks at virtualization in “a very broad
way” and that Hyper-V will be relevant and easy to use for
the largest of corporations with hundreds of servers as well as the
smallest of businesses with only a few.
Hyper-V can be downloaded currently from the Microsoft website in
“about four-and-a-half hours” and will meld with
Windows Server versions 2003 and 2008. The download will not cost
anything for the existing users of these software. Also, beginning
July 8, the Hyper-V update will become part of the company’s
Live update roster – which means it will update automatically
on machines without requiring users to manually download it.
For earlier versions of Windows, Microsoft has a different
virtualization product, called the Virtual Server. The new
technology of Hyper-V is different from the old in that Hyper-V
uses a hypervisor “to provide hardware abstraction services
to the OS environment and do resource allocation and
partitioning,” as per a blog post by technology writer Mary
Jo Foley.
Experts say that the advantage of a hypervisor – also called
a virtual machine manager, a program that allows multiple OSes to
be hosted on a single system and share the system’s computing
resources – is that it is relatively faster and more scalable
for the needs of large enterprises.
While Microsoft is a late entrant to the fast growing server
virtualization segment dominated by EMC-owned VMWare, Schutz told
Network Computing that, till date, only about 7% of servers in the
world are virtualized. Which means the battlefield is still kind of
virgin territory for anyone with the muscle to take it. And even
though VMWare put on some brawn through its association with EMC,
Microsoft’s “Windows familiarity and ease-of-use”
pitch to CIOs and technology managers, buttressed with its
marketing dollars, will make it quite an interesting fight
ahead.
Watch this space for more.