As any other vendor entering the market with a brand new product, Microsoft needs to build a solid credibility for Hyper-V 1.0. To achieve the task the company decided to starting from the hosting providers.
On Monday a couple of testimonials appeared on the Microsoft Virtualization Team corporate blog: one is from myhosting.com and the other is from hostbasket.com.
Both providers are offering their customers dedicated or shared physical servers powered by Windows 2008 with Hyper-V.
On top of these ones, a third firm, Layered Technologies, announced the entrance of Hyper-V in its hosting platforms portfolio (despite still in beta).
Last but not least, Microsoft published an interview with John Zanni, General Manager of Worldwide Hosting, where he discloses how Hyper-V will be included in September in the Hosting Deployment Accelerator (HDA), a free blueprint for hosting projects.
Zanni also unveils that 256 hosting providers wordwide (including huge ones like GoDaddy and Rackspace) are currently adopting Windows Server 2008, implying that most of them may decide to offer Hyper-V as well.
The whole thing is interesting because in general the hosting industry seems to prefer OS virtualization (and in particular the product Virtuozzo Containers offered by Parallels) rather than hardware virtualization.
It’s strange that Microsoft decided to start from here to promote its bare-metal hypervisor, invading the realm of a business partner like Parallels.
Update: After myhosting.com and hostbasket.com, Microsoft adds MaximumASP to the list of hosting providers working with Hyper-V.