Bare Metal Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta
You may have already read in numerous places about the release of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta. Well on a quieter note a week after that release, Microsoft have now released the R2 version of their bare metal Hyper-V server. Now as you probably already know, Hyper-V Server 2008 is free and is comparable to VMware’s free hypervisor ESXi (well in that it’s free)
You can grab your copy by clicking the following link Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta and there is an accompanying overview document which you can also download.
Now the good news is that Hyper-V server 2008 R2 matches the features of the Enterprise edition of Windows Server 2008. This means support for 8 CPU sockets (32 core count with quad core) and 1TB of memory, it also supports clustering and both quick and live migration features. Thanks to the guys at Virtualization.info for the information in the following table which demonstrates perfectly, the feature synergy between the bare metal and the full fat windows offerings.
| 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 |
You will note that SVCMM 2008 SP1 is being mentioned in this table. The overview document details the fact that at present Hyper-V server 2008 cannot be managed using the SCVMM as it is not supported. Microsoft are however working on update, likely to be called SCVMM 2008 SP1 to allow for management of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 using the virtual machine manager.
