As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers two flavors of its hypervisor: the first is part of the Windows operating system, no matter if it’s the Server Core version or the fully-featured one, the second is a stand-alone product.
There are some remarkable differences between the two: the former places Windows Server 2008 in its parent partition, using its driver model and licensing terms, while the latter comes with a minimal version of Windows (even smaller than Server Core) and thus can offer just a subset of features. Additionally, this second version can’t use the licensing term of its parent partition OS, so the customers must use it with existing licenses (for example the ones of Windows Server 2003 guests) or buy new ones.
Just one week after releasing Hyper-V 2.0 as part of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1, Microsoft is also releasing the stand-alone version of the beta.
There is welcome surprise: the two R2 versions are fundamentally the same, and even this stand-alone product ships with both Quick and Live Migration:
| Capabilities | Hyper-V Server 2008 | Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 | Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V |
| Number of Sockets | Up to 4 | Up to 8 | Up to 8 (EE) / Up to 64 (DE) |
| Number of Cores | Up to 24 | Up to 32 | Up to 32 |
| Maximum Memory | Up to 32GB | Up to 1TB | Up to 1TB |
| VM Migration | None | Quick and Live Migration | Quick and Live Migration |
| Number of VMs | Up to 192 | Up to 256 | Up to 256 |
| SCVMM supported | 2008 | 2008 SP1 | 2008 SP1 |
The product stays free of charge and can be downloaded here.