It seems like Microsoft is picking and choosing when hyper-v is a high end enterprise solution. At TechEd last week all the discusion was about all the functionality of Hyper-V and how it was comparable to ESX or surpassed EXS in most areas except for v-motion. Also, teaming does more then just cover for NIC failures. Our teamed NICs plug into different switches, so if a switch fails or we are doing maintanance on it, the other connection stays active.

The messaging that I keep hearing -- at least out of the in-the-field blue-badges -- is that Microsoft truly understands that they're second place at best. Hyper-V, at least in today's manifestation, is not the top-of-the-line virtualization platform that is ESX. But, there are those workloads that don't really require it. So, if you're hearing this messaging from Microsoft, I can see two possibilities: One is that they haven't really decided (or the speaker didn't really know) where it positions. Two, is that they've made some really great upgrades to Hyper-V that we in the public aren't aware of.

I can see both possibilities. During the keynote at TechEd they definitely didnt imply that Hyper-V was going to replace ESX, especially since they showed how you could manage an ESX enviornment with the Hyper-V tools. One other thing that I remember from my session though is that a couple people in the audience mentioned that teaming did work in fault tolerence mode only during their beta testing. Unfortunately I cant remember everything from the session because my brain had reached its new information quota from all the good sessions that day. Hyper-V is definitely a very tempting product, but it seems like it is going to be just about a half step away from us being able to deploy it in our enviornment when it is fully released.

I will tell you that between you and me (and everyone else reading this community) that I'm compelled enough by the prospect of VMware competition that I'm giving serious thought to authoring a book on Hyper-V starting here in Q3. I'm not sure if others are considering doing the same, but it'll be nice to have at least one definitive guide out there to it.

If it isn't a competitor, then why waste the time. Teaming NICS is a requirement, I don't know how the could have dropped the ball on this - teaming is a basic for some virtualization applications, so this is yet another disappointment from M$. I would stay away from W8K until this issue is resolved.

I completely agree with you that NIC teaming is a requirement -- for some workloads. Not all of your servers have an absolute requirement for NIC teaming, and I'll bet that many environments don't use it at all. In fact, the last time I was doing true systems administration (rather than consulting), I eliminated NIC teaming because I found it to be more of a pain and expense than an assist. This wasn't a mission critical environment, so it was OK in the end.

So, I guess my response is that we have to be careful when we think we know what's good for every environment. If Microsoft is indeed positioning Hyper-V as a second-tier virtualization platform, then it makes sense that they'd move out a first-tier feature like this to a future release.