No Guarantee of Success for Microsoft's Hyper-V Virtualization - Hyper-V Goes RTM
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Microsoft announced on June 26 that Hyper-V has been released to manufacturing, an indicator that the beta process has ended and Hyper-V is now a shipping and supported technology. To move the product from release candidate status to RTM, several bug fixes and improvements had to be accomplished. While most of the bug fixes were little more than housekeeping items, the improvements to the technology were significant.

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Moving from the beta to the shipping process brought forth enhancements such as increased performance, additional operating system support and better integration with management tools. On the increased performance front, Microsoft has reduced the operational overhead of Hyper-V to less than 10 percent in most cases and to as little as 1 percent in specific situations using iSCSI storage and other high performance hardware.

What’s important to note is the vast improvement of performance Hyper-V offers over Microsoft’s previous virtualization platform, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. Tests have shown that virtual systems under Hyper-V can achieve performance more than double what Virtual Server could. That can be explained by the simple fact that Hyper-V uses a completely new code base; no code was reused from Virtual Server.

Another prominent enhancement Hyper-V offers comes in the form of management. Microsoft is offering several management tools that ease the support of Hyper-V. Most notable is System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which allows administrators to monitor and manage both Microsoft virtualization solutions and VMware virtualization products. The ability to manage both will prove to be an important consideration for those looking to move from VMware to Hyper-V. What’s more, Virtual Machine Manager can be used to convert servers from physical to virtual machines (known as P2V conversion) with a wizard-based process. That should speed adoption greatly.

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