Last week Steven Sinofsky announced Hyper-V for Windows 8. Five reasons you will like this:
- Client-side type-1 hypervisor. Runs directly on the hosts’ hardware, which means that you will have high performance access to the hardware, better than an installed type-2 hypervisor.
- Hyper-V is a feature in Windows 8: You can easily switch the feature on to enable and use this on your machine.
- Less cost for virtual machines: Depending on Windows Edition and licensing, Hyper-V included, so an additional VMware Workstation license is no longer needed.
- Run several machines in parallel: You can run multiple virtual machines in parallel and dynamic memory access takes care of the (de)-allocated RAM.
- Virtual Hard Disk format (VHD and VHDx) to easily exchange and use them in different environments.
Looking at Citrix XenClient, Microsoft could build something similar with Hyper-V for IT pros. Citrix once licensed the VHD format from Microsoft. Depending of the relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, I’d really like to know if Microsoft will leave this segment for Citrix. If Microsoft would change their strategy and develop this on their own, this would be a game changer – especially with integration into SCCM.
Let me know you thoughts about Hyper-V.
Full Microsoft article and video at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx
Patrick Sauerwein | @virtual_patrick 