Microsoft Thursday released its Hyper-V virtualization server, which has been nearly five years in the making and is a major play in the company's march toward services-based computing.

Hyper-V, which was code named Viridian and Windows Server Virtualization, hit its release-to-manufacturing (RTM) stage and will be posted on the company's Web site today. It also will be available via automatic update starting July 8.

Hyper-V is free to users with a Windows Server 2008 license.

Microsoft originally said Hyper-V would ship "within 180 days of the shipment of Windows Server 2008," which was Feb. 27. Most experts had pegged August as the delivery timeframe, but in April Microsoft began to hint that the software would come in June or July. Regardless, the technology has been late in arriving given that it was originally slated for inclusion with Windows Server 2008. 

Virtualization is one of the hottest technologies in corporate computing today, although many studies show only a small percentage of servers have been virtualized so far. Still Microsoft is entering a crowded field and can't afford any gaffs.

VMware is the dominant player and says it is ready for Microsoft's challenge. In addition, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun and Novell all offer Xen-based virtualization platforms. Just last week, Red Hat introduced a new Linux-based hypervisor called oVirt that can fit onto a 64MB flash drive and boot on virtually any piece of x86 hardware.

"Microsoft knows a lot is riding on Hyper-V," says Rand Morimoto, a consultant with Convergent Computing, which helps companies implement virtualization and has some 20 Hyper-V customers with more than 100 virtualized servers deployed.

Late to the game

To underscore the importance of Hyper-V, Microsoft's incoming chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, has tagged virtualization as one of the foundation technologies for the company's software plus services platform that will define the next chapter in its history.

A survey conducted in February by Walker Information for IT services and product supplier CDW, however, found that users have not been waiting for Microsoft.

The survey showed that 35% of respondents have already implemented server virtualization, 18% are evaluating the opportunity and 9% are making plans to implement within the next 12 months. That means many are already running or evaluating the platforms that will compete with Hyper-V.

But some users in the Hyper-V early adopter program say the software is making their initial skepticism fade away.

"With performance, so far so good," says Robert McShinsky, systems engineer for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Hanover, N.H. McShinsky runs 15 virtual servers on Hyper-V and 150 on Microsoft's current platform, Virtual Server 2005 R2.

"In our testing, Hyper-V has just blown away Virtual Server. We started to push higher transaction databases into it. We have a lot more flexibility around disk I/O. We also wanted some of the benefits of quick migration so we could provide service level one [support] by being able to move things back and forth for application availability and management."

McShinsky, however, thinks Microsoft must deliver live migration features similar to what VMware has with VMotion in order to fully challenge the market leader. (See related story, "VMware trumps Hyper-V on functionality, but not on price".) 

Microsoft cut the live migration features from Hyper-V in May last year but plans to add them in a future version. At that time, Microsoft also dropped the ability to hot-add resources such as storage and memory and reduced the number of processors supported from 64 to 16.

Regardless of the development delays, DHMC is building virtualization clusters on HP 460C blade servers and wants 75% of its infrastructure virtualized in the future.

"That will make it easier to manage, easier to provision and easier to recover," McShinsky says.

Management a key issue

In March, Microsoft said the three most common roles virtualized among early adopters were IIS, application server and Terminal Services, and that the four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront. The company said more than half its testers are running an antivirus/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance, and approximately 75% are running Hyper-V with some attached storage.

Despite those numbers, Microsoft says it is still testing some of its more complex applications with Hyper-V.

"For some app teams, they do want some more time with the RTM bits to do final qualifications," says Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization. "For Exchange and SharePoint, they want to provide prescriptive guidance to customers on specific configuration and sizing parameters. You will see that material come out over the next couple of months as each team validates their solutions."

Whitepapers

• Advancing the Economics of Networking
• Enterprise Data Center Network Reference Architecture
• Implementing HA at the Enterprise Data Center Edge to Connect to a Large Number of Branch Offices
• File Integrity Monitoring: Secure Your Virtual and Physical IT Environments
• 6 Simple Steps to Disaster Recovery Planning
• PRICING STUDY: GROUNDWORK OPEN SOURCE VS. HP SOFTWARE

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE Market
• Creating a high performance workplace with wireless networking
• Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance
• Making data centers the IT strategic focus
• Protecting assets and employees with IP Video Surveillance
• Stay out of the headlines: Detecting and preventing network intrusions

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• IT Buyer's Guide To: Data backup and Replication
• Bringing IT Operations Management to Open Source and Beyond
• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Virtualization Reality Check
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Get More From Your WAN

View more DATA CENTER special reports