If you don't already know, Hyper-V 2.0 is the next major update to Microsoft's hypervisor that will be released with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. Back during its initial release, Microsoft suggested that major Hyper-V updates will always align with major OS updates (think whole number and R2 version updates). This time will be no different.

But remember too back at the RTM of Windows Server 2008? Remember that Hyper-V was supposed to be six months behind Win2008's release? It ended up being a little shorter than that, but there was a delay.

Last night I found this article in the virtualization blog aggregator site HyperVoria. It originally came from the TechLog site and is sourced from a Rakesh Malhotra who appears to be a Microsoft engineer on the Hyper-V project. He writes:

The team is already hard at work on the next release to align with the Windows Server 2008 R2 hypervisor update. Like this release, there will be a short gap between the platform update and the management update but we'll align the releases as close as possible (incidentally, the reason it takes us a little extra time is because once the platform has shipped and everything is "locked", we still need to run through a final battery of tests and stabilization just to make sure everything works as advertised).

In bold above is Rakesh's answer as to why Hyper-V always trails Windows Server. It seems that once the codebase is locked for Server 2008, then and only then can the Hyper-V teams make their final tests and adjustments. This means the virtualizaton platform takes a little longer to get to us, but ensures that what we get remains bomb-proof.

Rakesh goes on to talk about what is arguably the most talked about new feature of Hyper-V 2.0: Live Migration:

As we showed back in September, Live Migration will make it's debut in Windows Server 2008 R2 and SCVMM VNext will take advantage of that feature in addition to all of the other new functionality going into the R2 release.

If nothing else, this update to the motioning capabilities of Hyper-V is the major hurdle that's inhibited its penetration into IT environments today. Once Microsoft overcomes this hurdle, which we'll see shortly, I suspect we'll see Hyper-V adoption skyrocket in all size environments.