Microsoft acknowledges the growth -- and the potential growth -- of the virtualization market with Hyper-V. It's Redmond's first enterprise-worthy virtualization product and is bundled with Windows Server (WS) 2008 (it's also available as a stand-alone server). It's a "Type-1," or bare-metal hypervisor, meaning it sits directly on the hardware, between the physical layer and the operating system.
The first public beta version, reviewed here, was made available last December. Microsoft has consistently maintained that the final version of Hyper-V will be out six months after the release of WS 2008. So keep in mind that this is beta software, and more changes are sure to be coming. With that caveat, let's peek under the hood and see what all the fuss is about.
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