Steve Evans has worked in the IT field for over 12 years, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He has consulted for small businesses on their IT infrastructure needs as well as worked for larger companies as a Systems Engineer. Steve has been a recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for the past 3 years, and is a Technical Speaker at various industry events.
Free Edition of Hyper-V
It’s technically called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. That’s why I call it the free edition of Hyper-V.
What you get is an ISO that will install Windows Server 2008 R2 Core edition running Hyper-V. And the license for that is 100% free. If you install a guest running Windows you will need a license for that, but if all you did was install Linux guests you could have a 100% licensing cost free environment.
Realistically if you are a windows shop you are going to be buying datacenter licenses for the physical CPU’s to cover an unlimited number of guests. And if you are not a windows shop you are not going to be using Hyper-V for no other reason than it does not have great Linux support yet. But if you just want to look at Hyper-V or use it in a lab environment this edition of Hyper-V can come in quite handy.
And yes this blog post is mostly here so I can find the download page in the future. If you can find it on your own within five minutes then I am impressed.
May 24th, 2011 at 7:56 am
Hi Steve … what are the physical server specs that this edition of Windows server will support? Max Processor/memory; for example. Also, with this version of Virtual server, would it allow me to set the guests to run at maximum available speed? (like the ‘old’ version of MS Virtual PC does). Or, do i have to give fine-grain-detail of processor allocation? My goal/thoughts are: use this version of Windows Server as the host OS on fairly beefy physical server. And then install WebSiteSpark licenses of Windows/SQL Web editions as guest OSes, as well as linux, XP/7 workstations, etc … Thanks!
and BTW; i use this blog post as a bookmark to find the download as well
May 27th, 2011 at 8:19 am
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx for the details to your questions. It supports up to 8 processors and 1TB of memory.
This is nothing like Virtual Server. If you’re familiar with VMware this is the counterpart to ESX.