Microsoft has never been that shy about trashing open source operating systems in order to boost its own proprietary platforms, and the latest perspective over the two products is merely a new chapter in the Windows vs. Linux saga. A Microsoft authored comparison involving Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Hypervisor is available for download via the Redmond company's Windows Server Compare. Microsoft has yet to make available the final version of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as the company only started serving Release Candidate 1 at the end of May 2008.

"Server virtualization delivers vastly improved management agility along with significant resource, power, and physical space savings to enterprise and small- to medium-business IT. Improved server management is a significant goal of virtualization, so prospective users must carefully consider how well each platform will integrate into their existing management infrastructure. Toward that end, this paper evaluates similarities and differences between the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) Hypervisor platforms," Microsoft stated in the comparison whitepaper.

In addition to the whitepaper, the Redmond company has also made available two screencasts in which the two hypervisors are compared. The Windows Screencast and the Linux Screencast provide an insight into the virtual machine creation methods, as well as the management tools and the resources available for the two products. Microsoft's conclusion is that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is superior to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Hypervisor in more than one point.

This despite of the fact that the company has found the two hypervisors to be architecturally similar. However, Hyper-V benefits from advanced compatibility with the guest platforms, superior support in terms of device drivers associated with target workloads and, perhaps most important of all, a high degree of compatibility with existent network management infrastructures.

"Hyper-V's ability to coexist alongside other Windows CIM management tools, and its integration with Microsoft System Center via Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to provide highly scalable administration across both physical and virtual servers make it very attractive for end-to-end virtualization deployment. And although RHEL5 Hypervisor offers some increased capability in the form of live migration, its overall management capabilities are limited, particularly for centralized administration," reads the conclusion of Microsoft's comparison.