The second version of Hyper-V is much awaited as Microsoft promised to introduce with it a virtual machine live migration technology that could rival with VMware VMotion and Citrix XenMotion.
As it seems that customers can’t live without this capability, the news that Microsoft won’t deliver Hyper-V 2.0 before 2010 immediately put the company out of competition for another year.
But Microsoft learned from the errors of the past and it’s trying to announce less and deliver more. So, with much surprise the new version of the hypervisor came out last week, as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta.
This first build, available for download to the general public, includes all the features already announced in a whitepaper in November 2008 plus some more:
- Live Migration (here a 5 minutes video showing it in action)
- Virtual disks hot plug
- Support for 32 logical processors
- Support for Second Level Address Translation or SLAT (usually known as Nested Page Tables or NPT
- Support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames
- Extended PowerShell support (with 240 new cmdlets for hard core scripting)
- CPU Core Parking
Along with Hyper-V 2.0, Windows Server 2008 R2 includes another much awaited virtualization component: the VDI connection broker.
Microsoft has in fact extended the Terminal Server (now called Remote Desktop services or RDS) capabilities to include a connection broker: the Remote Desktop Connection Broker.