2 October 2008

Microsoft’s new virtualisation products will help customers get virtual and manage their virtual and physical assets across datacentres and desktops

Zane Adam, senior director of virtualisation strategy at Microsoft Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced the final release and availability of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 during a TechNet Server and Tools event keynote address in London.

Ballmer also announced a new offering of specialised assessment and implementation services available from the Microsoft Services organisation designed to help customers use server virtualisation, and separate new training and certifications from Microsoft Learning for IT Professionals.

“Customers have been telling us that virtualisation is a top priority, but they continue to face multiple barriers to adoption, such as costs, complex tools and limited certified virtualisation professionals,” said Zane Adam, senior director of virtualisation strategy at Microsoft. “In response, Microsoft is breaking down these barriers through new training programmes and services, interoperability, centralised management tools, and a broad partner ecosystem built around the Windows hypervisor to help make virtualisation ubiquitous. Microsoft’s new virtualisation products will help customers get virtual and manage their virtual and physical assets across datacentres and desktops.”

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is a bare metal hypervisor-based server virtualisation product, and is now available as a no-cost Web download. The product is designed to provide a simplified and reliable virtualisation solution for customers to consolidate Windows or Linux workloads onto a single physical server or to run client operating systems and applications in server-based virtual machines in the data centre.