During its development lifecycle, the brand new hypervisor that Microsoft is creating to compete with VMware suffere delays and major features loss.
The release schedule that Microsoft always provided was: within 180 days after the codename Longhorn release. And because of the issues mentioned above nobody is really expecting Hyper-V to come any earlier than August 2008 (180 days after the February launch of Windows Server 2008).
But Microsoft seems to have some surprises.
First it released the Hyper-V beta 1 in December 2007, one months ahead of its last schedule update, and now it launches the Hyper-V release candidate, which means that the product is almost ready.
Unless Hyper-V will have same destiny of Windows 2000 (which went through three RC phases), customers (and competitors) may now start to consider the hypothesis that Microsoft may go RTM earlier than August. Much earlier.
The Release Candidate that Microsoft offers today is, as expected, feature-complete.
It extends support to the following guest OSes:
- Windows Server 2003 SP2
- Windows XP SP3
- Windows Vista SP1
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
The RC code should be available through Windows Update for those customers already adopting the beta 1 (despite Microsoft didn’t provide any fresh news about this).
Others that never tried the product before may want to do that downloading Windows Server 2008 here.