The release of Hyper-V 2.0 (aka Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V) and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is approaching.
The Release Candidate build is available since almost a month now, and Microsoft may release both platforms before 2010 as originally announced.
As the hypervisor hits the RC, the company unveils additional details about it.
In Q4 2008 we discovered the existence of a virtual machine live migration feature, along with the virtual disks hot plug capability and the support for nested page tables (NPT), TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames.
Now we know that Hyper-V 2.0 will support up to 64 logical processors on the host (8 CPUs each featuring 8 cores) and the so called Processor Compatibility Mode.
This last feature is critical to live migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor.
Surprisingly the Processor Compatibility Mode doesn’t rely on the two technologies that Intel and AMD developed to achieve the task, Intel FlexMigration and AMD-V Extended Migration, so Hyper-V 2.0 doesn’t depend on the processor.
Microsoft also published a new table detailing some limits of the upcoming edition of Hyper-V:
Of course the table is not updated to include the 64 logical processors support described above.