A First Look at Microsoft Hyper-V RTM

By Cameron Sturdevant

Microsoft uses a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format, while market leader VMware creates virtual hard drives using a VMDK, or Virtual Machine Disk, format. This screen shows a VHD being created in the newly released Hyper-V RTM.

Hyper-V’s high availabilities depend in large part on Microsoft’s Cluster Service. Virtual machines (as with other virtualization platforms) must be specially prepared to participate in the HA setup. However, as of today, the documentation isn-

Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta is in full swing. Based on the work going into the System Center family, this is a promising sign. Given that Microsoft is supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a guest operating system in Hyper-V, this may also herald greater Microsoft management integration with non-Windows systems.

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise easily ran inside a VM on a physical host running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. The stage is now set for organizations to start considering how and when to consolidate workloads in a virtualized ecosystem that includes Microsoft’s Hyper-V.