Windows 8 Client Gets a Piece of Windows Server 8 – Hyper-V

The evolution of the Windows 8 client includes some goodness from Windows Server 8, Microsoft has now confirmed, revealing that both platform flavors will feature a hypervisor.

Customers running Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are undoubtedly familiar with Hyper-V, the machine virtualization technology packed by default into the two operating systems.

Client-side virtualization solutions from the software giant have also been available, including Virtual PC and Windows Virtual PC, but neither as powerful as Hyper-V.

This will change with the advent of Windows 8 client, taking into consideration the integration of Hyper-V.

The role of a hypervisor, and that of virtualization solutions in general, is to emulate the computer hardware and enable multiple platforms to run on the same machine, simultaneously, both a guest operating system and host OSes.

“In brief, Hyper-V lets you run more than one 32-bit or 64-bit x86 operating system at the same time on the same computer. Instead of working directly with the computer’s hardware, the operating systems run inside of a virtual machine (VM),” revealed Mathew John, Principal Program Manager Lead on the Windows Hyper-V team.

There are more advanced hypervisors than Windows 8 client Hyper-V, but such bare-metal virtualization technologies are used with predilection by business customers and not end users.

“Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM. Hyper-V does support creation of both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in the VMs,” John added.

“Hyper-V’s dynamic memory allows memory needed by the VM to be allocated and de-allocated dynamically (you specify a minimum and maximum) and share unused memory between VMs. You can run 3 or 4 VMs on a machine that has 4GB of RAM but you will need more RAM for 5 or more VMs. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also create large VMs with 32 processors and 512GB RAM.”