Microsoft announced on Thursday that Hyper-V was released to manufacturing, and then about two seconds later the media frenzy began.

The company repeatedly stated that it would release Hyper-V within 180 days after the launch of Windows Server 2008. And while they removed a few key features in order to make sure they released a quality, stable product, they did beat the August time frame.

So finally after some three years of development work, Microsoft now has its own Type-1 virtual machine monitor, a virtualization hypervisor technology that it can be proud of, and one that earns the Redmond giant a seat at the big virtual table. The company finally has its own hypervisor to speak of when comparing its server virtualization technologies to others such as VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, and Parallels -- to name but a few. While Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 served a purpose and filled a void early on in the virtualization race, it couldn't stand up against the features and performance of its bare-metal competitors -- even with the low price of "free."