Is Microsoft Hyper-V ready?

Microsoft is doing everything they can do accelerate the RTM of Hyper-V. On March 19, 2008, they said that they reached a major milestone in the development process and announced the release candidate of Hyper-V. At this point, the code is baked and they will work on bug fixes and continue the QA process until they announce the RTM later this year….or will it be sooner rather than later? I think so!

In a research ESG survey, we asked current users what their primary server virtualization solution was. Of the current users, 70% chose VMware (no surprise) and 23% chose Microsoft. You have to remember that 23% said they are running Microsoft’s current solution, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. MS Virtual Server is a hosted solution which means it requires a full blown operating system to be installed and then the virtualization platform is layered on top of the OS. From this point, virtual machines are then created. Not such a hot architecture, but it works and eliminates the need to purchase additional physical servers in many cases which is a big win for any IT organization.

While the user community is excited to see Hyper-V on the near horizon, Microsoft still needs to prove that the product works, scales, delivers the required performance and, most importantly, is an extremely stable platform. Microsoft has a mixed past when it comes to 1.0 products. Remember SMS 1.0 and DPM 1.0….not so hot, but the 2.0 versions had major improvements. With the server virtualization market as hot as it is today, Microsoft can’t afford to slip on its timeline nor can they risk delivering an inferior product to the market.