Second release candidate for Hyper-V virtualization tool now available

Microsoft's ambitious, if somewhat reduced, goals of making hardware-supported virtualization a common feature of Windows Server, are one small step closer to fruition this afternoon.

The first release candidate of Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008's new hardware-based support for guest operating system virtualization, was released in March. In true binary tradition, that was Release Candidate 0. Today, Microsoft's Virtualization team has followed up with RC1, which adds limited guest operating system support for Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4. Testers running SUSE Linux 10 will be delighted to note that the upgraded system adds mouse integration support -- essentially, the guest Linux equivalent of Microsoft's "Virtual Machine Additions." This way, a guest Linux window can pick up the mouse pointer as it's moving across the whole Windows screen seamlessly, rather than create a situation where the pointer has to be "captured" every time the user switches from host to guest.

Also today, the Virtualization team revealed, through the publication of a special white paper (DOCX available here), that it had already completed the first stage of its own internal Hyper-V tests, which involved a full migration of the company's MSDN and TechNet servers from the physical to the virtual world.

"Hyper-V has been exceptionally stable, proving capable of delivering the end-to-end availability of MSDN and TechNet compared to the previous physical platform during both beta and RC0 usage," the team reports. "In fact, for the deployment so far, MSCOM Ops has not encountered a single production-impacting bug. This is definitely quite an accomplishment for the Hyper-V development team."

BetaNews FileForum also gives you access to the latest build of Hyper-V management tools for Windows Vista. This enables admins using Vista to remotely manage Hyper-V-hosted virtual servers, similarly to how Windows Server 2005 R2 can enable hosting of remote servers through software-based virtualization.

Microsoft does warn that some Hyper-V beta use is not compatible with the current commercial edition of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the company's commercial management tool for virtual machines. In a TechNet blog post this afternoon, the team said it plans to re-integrate Hyper-V support in a forthcoming beta of SCVMM 2008.