Thinking about ESXi? You Should Check Out Hyper-V Server.
Microsoft really throws down the gauntlet with this one. VMware not long ago decides to strip the ESX hypervisor away from its surrounding Linux distribution, making what results in a 32M operating system that's nothing more than the hypervisor itself. Now Microsoft responds with Hyper-V Server. Following the same philosophy, Microsoft strips away nearly everything that is Windows Server 2008 to make an OS that's little more than the Hyper-V hypervisor itself.
Best of all, just like VMware, they release it for free. Publicly-released details are still a little sketchy, but this "lite" version is designed to support smaller workloads with fewer management and hardware needs. Expect the download to appear in the next 30 days at this web site.
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Comments
Now that Hyper-V Server has been released, we can see that its not a stripped down hypervisor-only system. In fact, its pretty much Windows Server 2008 in core mode with the Hyper-V role installed. With a fairly large foot print.
Not that size alone should be used for consideration. Only that its not quite what you describe.
Posted by: Bill | October 22, 2008 11:42 AM
Agreed. When this was written, we didn't know how it was going to arrive. The end result is exactly what you describe here: A 1G installation that's effectively Server Core with only a very few roles available for installation and the Hyper-V role already pre-installed. But Hyper-V's 280K hypervisor arrives essentially intact (clustering is not supported).
I'll have to say that whether "stripped-down" means slightly more than 32M for ESXi or 1G for Server Core, the result is still "stripped down".
Posted by: Greg Shields | October 22, 2008 12:14 PM