14 DAY TRIAL // It's a veritable Release Candidate fiesta over at Microsoft. Along with the latest development milestones for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the Redmond company has also released a variety of software in RC stage. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate accompanied the RC milestones of both Windows server and client flavors to the market, and went live on the Microsoft Download Center on May 5. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 should not be confused with its “big brother” Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The former is a standalone virtualization solution, while the latter is the virtualization role in Windows Server.
“Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, our free standalone hypervisor, represents our continued commitment to providing high performance, hypervisor based virtualization for everyone, especially small and mid-market customers. This release underscores our customer focus by adding key new capabilities such as Live Migration and High Availability (and more),” explained Jeff Woolsey, principal group program manager, Windows Server, Hyper-V.
Not only is Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 a bare metal standalone hypervisor, but it is also available for free from Microsoft. This applies to the Release Candidate build, but also to the full RTM, when it will be made available. Despite offering a consistent evolution over Hyper-V Server 2008, including additional features such as Live Migration and High Availability, Microsoft will not put a price tag on the hypervisor.
“Live Migration is a great solution for planned downtime such as servicing the underlying hardware like adding more memory, storage or applying a BIOS update,” Woolsey stated. “High Availability is a great solution for unplanned downtime. For example, suppose someone accidentally unplugs the wrong power cable on a server. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 includes both these capabilities as well as our new Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) capabilities to simplify storage management and run multiple virtual machines from a single LUN.”
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.