HyperV - General

Q. What is Hyper-V?

A. Hyper-V, previously codenamed Viridian, is a hypervisor-based technology that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008. It provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available virtualization platform. It is part of Microsoft's ongoing effort to provide our customers and partners with the best operating system platform for virtualization.

Q. What is Windows hypervisor?

A. A core component of Hyper-V, Windows hypervisor is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the OS that allows multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. It provides simple partitioning functionality and is responsible for maintaining strong isolation between partitions. It has an inherently secure architecture with minimal attack surface, as it does not contain any third-party device drivers.

Q. What benefits does Hyper-V offer customers?

A. Hyper-V provides customers an ideal platform for key virtualization scenarios, such as production server consolidation, business continuity management, software test and development, and development of a dynamic datacenter.
Hyper-V provides key functionality, which an ideal virtualization platform should provide—scalability, high performance, reliability, security, flexibility, and manageability. It provides scalability and high performance by supporting features like guest multi-processing support and 64-bit guest and host support; reliability and security through its hypervisor architecture; flexibility and manageability by supporting features like quick migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another, and integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Q. Will Microsoft continue to support Linux operating systems with Hyper-V?

A. Yes, Microsoft will provide integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions as guest operating systems within Hyper-V. Beta Linux integration components are now available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 x86 and x64 Editions. These integration components enable Xen-enabled Linux to take advantage of the VSP/VSC architecture and provide improved performance. Beta Linux Integration components are available for immediate download through http://connect.microsoft.com.

Q. What about other Linux distributions?

A. The full list of supported operating systems will be announced prior to RTM.

Q. Can you provide a brief overview of Hyper-V's feature set?

A. Some of the capabilities of Hyper-V will include x64 host and guest support, ability to run guest machines in a multi-processor environment, large memory allocation per virtual machine, integrated virtual switch support, and ability to migrate virtual machines across hosts with minimal downtime. The key new features that are in Hyper-V beta are support for quick migration and high availability, ability to run Hyper-V as a Server Core role and integration of Hyper-V into Server Manager. For a full list of features, refer to the key features in Hyper-V RC.

Q. How will customers migrate to Hyper-V?

A. Customers who invest in the .vhd file format—the format used by Virtual Server, as well as a multitude of vendor licensees—will have a clear path forward to Hyper-V. Customers can leverage V2V capabilities in System Center Virtual Machine Manager to conveniently migrate from Virtual Server or VMware to Hyper-V or work with Microsoft's partners who provide migration solutions.