I’m really pleased to say that the release candidate of Hyper-V is available for download today. You can read the announcement and Jeff’s more detailed post. This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your own, because it’s feature complete, better performing than the beta, and you’ll have a better experience using it. Reports from the Hyper-V early adopter programs have matched some of the third-party reviews and first looks, with comments such as:
· “External deployments have exceeded Beta coverage goals”
· “External TAP deployments have increased significantly”
Amongst the early adopter customers, the three most common Windows Server 2008 roles run within Hyper-V are IIS, application server and Terminal Services. The four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront, while more than half of the customers are running an AV/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance at this point, and around 75% of the customers are running Hyper-V with some attached storage. At the same time we’re starting to see more and more and more ISV partners announce plans to support Hyper-V. So overall we’re seeing good enterprise uptake of Hyper-V.
I was in France and the Nordics two weeks ago attending launch events for Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Lots of the attendees had already started testing the beta of Hyper-V. Several people remarked that they were impressed with early testing of the multi-site clustering capabilities for remote disaster recovery. Beyond the technical capabilities, total cost of ownership was another hot topic. Given that Hyper-V is a role within Windows Server 2008 – the beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 – customers attending the launch were looking forward to having these server consolidation and DR capabilities built into Windows Server 2008. I did have to remind several folks that Hyper-V will be available with three, x64 editions of Windows Server 2008 (the versions of Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V are $28 less). And I often noted our work on cross-platform interoperability with Citrix/Xen, Novell and Sun, and that we’re opening up APIs to the community.
