By now, you’ve read a number of news articles and blog posts about new features in Hyper-V, and how Hyper-V is continuing to close the feature gap and is gaining market share against VMware.  Hyper-V has improved significantly since first released. One major contributor to this improvement is Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud platform that allows users to deploy VMs in the cloud. Azure is built on a customized Microsoft hypervisor called the Azure Hypervisor, highly optimized for the Azure cloud, whereas Hyper-V is a generalized platform hypervisor. As Azure continues to grow, useful features in its optimized hypervisor have made and continue to make their way into Hyper-V. For example, SLAT (Second Level Address Translation), a feature which reduces the overhead in translation of an address from virtual to physical for a guest VM, was first introduced in Azure then incorporated into Hyper-V in 2008 R2. The two hypervisors also interoperate, i.e., Hyper-V VMs can be uploaded to Azure, and VHDs from Azure downloadable and attachable to Hyper-V VMs locally.
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Oracle is also very interested in Microsoft virtualization environments, and recently announced a set of products that are now certified for Hyper-V and Windows Azure. Prior to this announcement, Oracle only supported their own hypervisor. This Oracle features certified include Java, the Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Oracle Linux. It is not known at this time if Oracle will sign deals with other vendors, but is certainly a win for Microsoft Azure and Hyper-V.
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In summary, it is an interesting time for Microsoft’s Hyper-V, if you are interested in seeing what is coming in the newest release, you can download a preview here.