Following the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft reached another milestone with the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008. The nearly 1.5 million copies of the Hyper-V beta version that have been distributed demonstrate how customer interest in virtualization is moving from evaluation to production environment deployments.

Virtualization can help companies maximize the value of IT investments, decreasing the server hardware footprint, energy consumption and cost and complexity of managing IT systems while increasing the flexibility of the overall environment. Microsoft’s strategy and investments in virtualization — which span from the desktop to the datacenter — help IT professionals and developers implement Microsoft’s Dynamic IT initiative, whereby they can build systems with the flexibility and intelligence to automatically adjust to changing business conditions by aligning computing resources with strategic objectives.

Hyper-V offers customers a reliable, scalable and high-performance virtualization platform that plugs into customers’ existing IT infrastructures and enables them to consolidate some of the most demanding workloads. In addition, the Microsoft System Center product family gives customers a single set of integrated tools to manage physical and virtual resources, helping customers create a more agile and dynamic datacenter.

“Customers who buy Windows Server 2008 are not only getting the scalability benefits, the high performance and reliability, and all the great things that Windows Server is known for; as of today they can benefit from integrated virtualization with Hyper-V,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy at Microsoft.

Customers Going Virtual
More than 250 customers have participated in the early adopter programs for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Land O’Lakes, HotSchedules and The SCOOTER Store were some of the first customers to deploy Hyper-V and experience its benefits firsthand.

Minnesota-based Land O’Lakes suffered from a common IT challenge resulting from tremendous growth through mergers and acquisitions. The agricultural cooperative’s datacenter was packed with a compilation of aging servers running at an average utilization rate of just 3 percent, putting a considerable strain on IT resources.