Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, is available as an integral feature of Windows Server 2008 and enables you to implement server virtualization with ease. Hyper-V allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With
Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product that provides a simplified, reliable, cost-effective, and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. It allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a good solution for organizations that want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments. Low utilization infrastructure workloads, departmental applications, and simple branch office workloads are also candidates to virtualize using Hyper-V Server.
A key benefit of virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system and share the underlying hardware resources known as partitioning.
Hardware-level virtualization,
Operating systemlevel virtualization,
and high-level language virtual machines.
For Unix/RISC and industry-standard x86 systems, the two approaches typically used with software-based partitioning are hosted and hypervisor architectures .
A hosted approach [...]
