Jeff Woolsey Principal Group Program Manager for Windows Server Hyper-V this morning blogged about Microsoft Hyper V R2’s ability to offer HA and Live Migration for Free! Whilst many have known this is on the way, it does raise many questions on how this is going to reflect with VMWare, are they going to be forced to go down the same route or as said by VMware, is this just a sign of weakness by the competition?
To get HA and Live migration with Hyper V R2 you can use either the free Failover Cluster Manager/Hyper-V Manager, or purchase System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, this will also unlock other features such as templates, clones and powershell support!?.
So even though two of the headline features that have been dangled by VMware for some time, are free from Microsoft, you will still need to pay for the System Center Virtual Machine Manager to get a experience anywhere near that of VMWare the equivelent VMware system dipicated by Microsoft.
I personally haven’t used Hyper V R2 yet and being a VMware fan will always be synical to Microsoft’s attempts at virtualisation, but this is an interesting move from Microsoft and could defiantly effect VMWare’s SMB share even with the announcement of the essentials pack announced with vSphere, it will be interesting to see how and if VMware responds.
Link to Microsoft Blog >> http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-release-candidate-free-live-migration-ha-anyone.aspx
Virtualised Reality 