Microsoft Hyper-V ready to go?
Our colleagues at ZDNet US are reporting that Microsoft's long awaited virtualisation management tool – or hypervisor – may be released to manufacturing tomorrow.
According to Microsoft watcher extraordinaire Mary-Jo Foley, "testers claiming familiarity with the company’s plans", have let slip that Hyper-V will beat the goal which Microsoft set back for it when Windows Server 2008 was launched back in February.
The company gave itself six months to launch Hyper-V following the release of WS 2008 and if this story proves true – and we have no reason to doubt Mary Jo's scoop ability – then Microsoft should have beaten that by a month or so.
Mary -Jo asks on her blog whether any customers are waiting for Hyper-V, and if the results of a recent ZDNet UK poll are to be believed, then the answer is a big fat no.
Our research revealed that many end users are still wary of implementing virtualisation and, when they do so, still view it as separate technology from the operating system.
With survey respondents asked to rank operating-system features in order of importance, virtualisation came last, in eleventh place, with scalability, high reliability and identity management taking the top three positions.
However, despite not viewing virtualisation as a key feature for server operating systems, respondents cited virtualisation and consolidation as key server-management tasks in the next five years.
Interestingly though Microsoft's Hyper-V news comes out just after server OS rival Red Hat announced its own hypervisor product.
Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.
The Red Hat Embedded Linux Hypervisor is founded on the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) project, which has been integrated into the Linux kernel since 2006. Red Hat has claimed KVM supports live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real-time and also has high availability features.