Microsoft Delivers Hyper-V Release Candidate

According to several other blogs and the Microsoft web site, Hyper-V Release Candidate is now available

"Does anyone know if MS will release a Hyper-V for Vista? Or at least an upgrade to Virtual PC to support x64 VMs?" Not likely. Not that I'm saying it's impossible and all, but it's just not something that people absolutely need at the desktop level (yet). The best answer that I can say is to wait for Hyper-V Server - the standalone one, not the one that exists as part of Server 2008 - and run all your operating systems under it. You'd be able to migrate and virtualize your Vista install to it, so long as it has SP1 installed. You could, of course, run whatever other OS you want assuming it's supported side-by-side with your Windows installations. Hypervisor technology just wasn't designed to run at the desktop level yet, since the level of use of operating systems running side-by-side with full hardware resources available to them would be very slim, unless you're into OS deployment testing - like me - or something like that. Eventually we'll get there, but for now, it's just not ready for prime time. I'd eventually like to see Virtual PC turning away from emulated environments and just turn into a VM manager that exposes an underlying hypervisor. I Q'd up the same points on this post here: http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98550/microsoft-buys-virtualiz... As or the x64 stuff, it's not integrated yet because at the desktop level it's just not warranted for the performance hit you take on it. I'd expect it on the server level first, but I doubt Microsoft will integrate it into Virtual Server, since Hyper-V already supports it and pretty well all hardware on the market is capable of running Hyper-V now.

"I would think MS would want to address this quickly, since I may find I like the other product better, and not go back to the MS solution." They already did, although the product is not available yet - think RTM timeframe: "Hyper-V Server" (standalone - sans Windows Server 2008) = $28 No need to buy a huge-ass server operating system if all you need is to run VM's. I'm curious to know how it's going to work. I suspect it'll be some kind of limited command-line shell, similar to Windows Server Core, but with only the VM role and commands available. Likely the hypervisor, a "lite" version of the Server Core kernel, and a commandline. Hey, if you're just going to virtualize your OS environments side-by-side, it's all you really need. ....ok, maybe a bit of scripting skillz too ;)