Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Will Continue to Be Free

Microsoft will continue offering its standalone hypervisor as a free download, even after the delivery of the upcoming version. The next iteration of the Redmond company's hypervisor is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, which will be made available for download at no cost, even though customers will be able to benefit from additional features and capabilities, marking the evolution from Windows Server 2008 to Windows 7 Server (Windows Server 2008 R2). Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center, revealed that Microsoft was simply attempting to tailor its virtualization solution to generalized customer trends to cut back on spending as much as possible.

“Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free, and now will include live migration and host clustering capabilities. Customers won’t need to pay thousands of dollars for alternate virtualization platforms to get these features. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, customers have a solution for both planned and unplanned downtime and can use it for scenarios like server consolidation, branch server consolidation, high availability, and VDI,” Adam explained.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is designed as a standalone hypervisor, based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Adam indicated that the Redmond giant remained committed to the evolution of Hyper-V Server 2008 in light of the upcoming release. In this context, the evolution of the standalone hypervisor will include not only performance and scalability enhancements, but also live migration and host clustering. At the same time, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 will be capable of offering high availability on up to 16 nodes.

“These same features also will be available in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-v, which provides our customers with core virtualization features as part of Windows Server offering. With Windows Server 2008 R2, customers also get flexible virtualization rights (e.g., 4 free virtual instances with Windows Server Enterprise Edition and unlimited virtual instances with Windows Server Datacenter Edition)” Adam added.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta is available for download here.