Yesterday at TechEd 2012, Microsoft Introduced Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Along side the releases of Server 2008 and 2008R2, Microsoft has also published a free, bare-bones hypervisor OS; Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This has been a stripped-down version of Server Core, a command-line driven distribution of Windows Server–excluding all server roles but Hyper-V.

The first release had the same limitations as Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, which kept it from competing with free products from VMWare or Citrix. Hyper-V Server 2008R2 saw numerous improvements, namely the introduction of live migrations and allowances for an increased number of virtual processors and greatly increased virtual memory. That release was far more popular as it essentially met feature parity with other free hypervisors from Citrix and VMWare.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V leapfrogs the competition in feature-set and power. In fact, the free version of Microsoft’s hypervisor has several major features lacking from the expensive paid-for offerings from VMWare. Most notably, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V can perform VM migrations from one host to another with no shared storage. The moment I heard that, I thought of a dozen clients that could benefit from it. Imagine building a private cloud with no shared storage, just a few servers on a domain.

Here’s a breakout of the capacities of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and VMWare’s paid product. Keep in mind VMWare is also licensed per-CPU.

Hypervisor	Maximum virtual CPUs	Maximum host memory	Maximum guest memory	Maximum virtual disk size	Maximum cluster nodes	Maximum cluster VMs
VMWare VSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus	160	2TB	1TB	2TB	32	3,000
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V RC	320	4TB	1TB	64TB	64	4,000

I’m excited about working with the new version, and so were the 1,200 attendees in the standing room-only  crowd watching the presentation. Download your copy of the release candidate now!