Holy Crap, Batman. It's "Hyper-V Server 2008 R2" Beta.
Like a stealth bomber flying too low to be detectable by radar, Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 was just put into public beta status . Because of all the hoopla over Windows 7 this piece of very interesting beta software was very much overlooked.
This edition adds:
- Support for VMotion-like “Live Migration”
- Support for Failover Clustering
- Improved Memory and CPU Support
- Improved Config utility
The previous version of Hyper-V also supported failover clustering…this isn’t new.
What is new is the Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) that will allow the nodes to actually share simultaneous access to a disk. This is how Microsoft is doing “Live Migration”.
John Savill (EMC employee and fellow cluster MVP) posted a little video about CSVs here:
http://www.savilltech.com/Videos/LiveMigration/LiveMigration640480.wmv
Hey John,
I love Savill’s videos. He wrote the book on Windows 2008. I especially like the one where he is getting his butt whipped on the local news show in some type of martial arts demonstration…
To your point, Hyper-V within a full OS supported clustering. But Failover Clustering within the Free edition of “Hyper-V Server” is new in this release… this is the standalone, no base OS needed, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The only hurdle is having the server to run it.
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/faq.mspx
Q: Does Microsoft Hyper-V Server include high availability (failover clustering) capabilities for unplanned downtime?
A: No. If high availability is a customer requirement, then we recommend using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter Editions which include integrated failover clustering support.
And also this feature comparison chart (they will essentially fill out the empty part of the chart).
http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx
Very interesting and surprising no one else is really talking about this (they are all beta testing Windows 7 I think)…
They are essentially bundling some pretty major features into the freebie edition of their hypervisor. Once again they are attempting to be very disruptive by offering more features for less dollars.
But who knows how effective it will be.
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Sweet picture