Mike D’s Blog

Bink.nu did a great write-up earlier this week on the future of Hyper-V. Hyper-V has been out for 4 months and yet we’re already talking about (and some people are waiting for) Hyper-V 2.0. Hyper-V 2.0 will be available when Windows Server 2008 R2 launches. According to most reports and Microsoft’s public website the product will be here in 2010. Sorry, Microsoft fans, you’ll have to play the waiting game again. I’m sure you’re already used to that after waiting 1 1/2 of slipping for Hyper-V 1.0 to come out. Below is a run down on the features that Microsoft has promised for Hyper-V 2.0, when VMware first had those same features, and how late Microsoft is to market with their roadmap.

• Live Migration – Part of VMware (VMotion) since 2003 (7 years late)
• Clustered File System – Part of VMware (VMFS) since 2001 VMFS (9 years late)
• 32 logical processors – Supported in VMware since 2006 (4 years late)
• Hot-add virtual disks – Supported in VMware ESX 3 (4 years late)
• Hot-remove virtual disk – Not supported in VMware yet
• SLAT (memory virtualization) – AMD RVI and Intel EPT supported in VMware today (2 years late)
• Dynamic memory – Supported in VMware since 2001 (9 years late)

This just cements the fact that Microsoft is 5 to 6 years behind current shipping technology. Of course if you’d like to wait around for another 2 years to get the features that VMware has in the product today then be my guest – it’s your money that you’re wasting by not taking advantage of virtualization today. And who’s to say Microsoft won’t drop the very features you’re waiting for from the product before it ships like they did with so many features before.

The bottom line is you don’t have to wait for a roadmap. All of the features on Microsoft’s roadmap are here today with a proven technology used by hundreds of thousands of customers – VMware ESX. Go ahead and download a copy today to get started.