Hyper-V

Hyper-V is a Microsoft's hypervisor based Virtualization technology. Hyper-V is included in Server 2008 x64 editions, as well as the hypervisor itself (Hyper-V Server 2008) is available for free download. So far Server 2008, Server 2003, SUSE Linux are supported as its guest OS. Hyper-V brings the customer great opportunity for server consolidation, efficient resource management for better performance (maximum 24CPU cores and 2TB RAM, depending on editions) building scalable and fault tolerant architecture, combined with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

To make Hyper-V virtual servers highly available, there are different level of clustering; Host-level Clustering (two or more Hyper-V physical server clustering with shared storage), Guest-level Clustering (failover cluster between virtual servers), or combining them. System Center Virtual Machine Manager manages not just virtual machines on Hyper-V but as well as virtual machines on VMware ESX. It provides tool to convert physical server to virtual server (P2V converter) as well as virtual server to virtual server (V2V converter), for example VMware virtual server to Hyper-V virtual server. System Center Virtual Machine Manager also provide High Availability configuration as well as Quick Migration/Live Migration that allows virtual machine to move to another physical Hyper-V host with very little downtime.

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