During this week's Server 2008 Launch event here in Denver, I was asked by Microsoft to present for the Partner Roundtable on Virtualization. Also there was Microsoft's local expert on Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005. After working with Microsoft for this presentation, the residual concerns I had about Hyper-V and its abilities have now been eliminated.

In all but the most high-end of environments, Hyper-V is going to serve the needs of IT without the added cost of VMware's high-end ESX system. Even Hyper-V's QuickMigration feature, which works a lot like VMotion, supports the ability for scheduled virtual machine host relocation with a minimum of disruption.

QuickMigration does not power down the virtual machine to move it. The machine remains on-line. The only difference between it and VMotion is in the number of seconds the machine won't be able to process requests (e.g. respond to ping packets). With VMotion a machine typically loses about one ping packet. With QuickMigration, its more like a few seconds worth.

Additionally, Hyper-V's paravirtualized driver set (as pictured above) arrives with substantial performance improvements over typical emulated drivers. Emulated drivers require a translation of in-VM hardware resource requests before they can be used by the local host. Paravirtualized drivers and OS's have an "awareness" of the host operating system and work with it and on-chip virtualization extensions to directly pass those requests without translation. This has the effect of significantly reducing the amount of virtualization overhead, which in-turn increases performance, increases the number of simultaneously-hostable VM's, and makes some otherwise non-candidate physical machines more likely to be successfully virtualized.

What's particularly interesting about Microsoft's approach is in their ability to use emulation for guest OS's that haven't been previously "enlightened" to work with paravirtualization. These OS's, like SUSE and Novell, automatically use emulation to extend the support of onboard machines.

Microsoft's virtualization play is smart, their product is excellent even before release, and best of all its inexpensive in comparison with others on the market. If you haven't played around with it yet, do so. I think you'll be impressed.