With the release of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft will jumps more seriously into the virtualization market.

For a long time they have provided Microsoft Virtual Server (and product we have supported for year and have vast experience with) to support multiple virtualized servers on a single machine. From our experience, there have been a few main challenges with this:

1) Running Virtual Server on a server requires that operations go through the virtualized guest system, then Virtual Server, then Windows Server, then to the hardware. While they did a pretty good job with performance, there are still a number of “fat” layers involved in the processing.

2) They have been slow to support 64-bit guest operating systems. This became even more of a problem with Exchange 2007 was released, that is expected to be the first of many applications released in ONLY a 64-bit version.

3) Resource management options are limited. Limits can be set on guests and load can be controlled to an extent, but not nearly as much as I would prefer. One “runaway” virtual server often doesn’t cause problems, but if a few really run load up high at the same time – trouble can occur – and Virtual Server really doesn’t have a good way to deal with it.

Also along the lines of resource management is high-availability. This is an option with Microsoft Virtual Server but through the Windows Clustering features. Adding a layer of availability to the deployment in this method becomes costly and wasteful (well, not ideal usefulness) of expensive enterprise-level hardware.

Windows Server Hyper-V is a large step forward to address these and other issues. It moves Microsoft closer to being a serious competitor in a space that is currently dominated by VMWare.

Some of the touted improvements include enhanced improvements by moving from a host-based to a hypervisor-based model; support for more RAM, multiple virtual processors, and 64-bit operating systems in the guest; better high-availability options including migration of live/running virtual machines (though this feature has been dropped from the first release, I expect it will be a priority for the development team to get implemented).

I believe virtualization will have a huge impact on how servers are built and managed in the future and it is exciting to see Microsoft working on a solid offering in this area. Hyper-V is sure to push VMWare and others to all step-up even faster so that the overall market will be enhanced significantly across-the-board in the next few years.

Are you running the beta version of Hyper-V? Have some other insight to share? I welcome your thoughts – post comments below.

~Brad