I felt a bit sad when i meet one my customer few days ago who want to deploy virtualization project. The customer told me that they did not realise that Microsoft has a FREE hypervisor and has been using ESXi on virtualization.
Therefore, i start to educate them by asking the customer to switch over to use Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008 R2 which is FREE. For those who do not know, it is a stand alone hypervisor, command based (no GUI) and has a menu to configure certain configuration.
Another good news is Microsoft has just released Hyper V Server 2008 R2 SP1 which included with Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX. To download, please click on this link.
For the benefit of people, who do not know the different between Full and Stand Alone Hyper V.
Well, No big difference except stand alone Hyper V did not come with license right compare to Standard/Enterprise/Data Center Edition. For each VM created, you need to have license. Therefore, i recommend that you use stand alone Hyper V when you have existing Windows Server 2003 . By leveraging your existing license, you just need to get a server which has the following requirement:
- Hardware assisted virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V)
- Hardware DEP
- 64 bit hardware (not IA64, Itanium server)
Then, next question is “How about management? since Hyper V came with no GUI and ESXi has web console to manage it.
Well, don’ worry. Microsoft has also released RSAT for Windows 7 with SP1. Click on this link to get it. You just install on your laptop or desktop which is running on Windows 7 with SP1. Here you will get Hyper V Manager mmc snap-in which allow you to manage your Hyper V environment.
So for existing ESXi user, please start to try the stand alone Hyper V Server 2008 R2 SP1. Enjoy!
Cheers- “Virtual Lai'”
