Microsoft has released the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for free download on the Microsoft Download Center. The company said that the new virtualisation platform is a stand-alone product with the addition of new features such as live migration and expanded processor and memory support for host systems, which allows organisations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server.
According to Microsoft, the new release enables companies to reduce costs, improve utilisation and provision new servers, by having the ability to plug into existing IT infrastructures. It allows IT professionals to leverage existing patching, provisioning, management and support tools and processes.
The new offering provides support for physical computers with up to eight physical processors and support for up to 1TB of physical memory. In addition, it provides support for 64 logical processors and support for running up to 384 virtual machines with up to 512 virtual processors.
The company added that the new release features a processor compatibility mode for live migration across different processor SKU’s from the same vendor. It offers support for VMQ, Jumbo Frames and Chimney. It also features the ability to hot add / remove virtual storage.
This Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will compete with VMware’s hypervisor, ESXi and Citrix’s XenServer among other products. Reportedly, the first version of Hyper-V had arrived in June 2008.
