Microsoft has announced the availability of a feature-complete release candidate of Hyper-V, its long awaited hypervisor virtualisation product.

Left out of Windows Server 2008 when it launched in February, Hyper-V differs from existing Microsoft virtualisation products in that it interfaces more directly with the underlying hardware rather than running on top of a host operating system. The end result is enhanced performance and scalability plus, in theory, a much more secure solution.

Billed as “the next major milestone in virtualisation development”, Hyper-V lags far behind offerings from competitors such as VMWare and XenSource (now a part of Citrix), both of which have well established hypervisor-based virtualisation products.

Another issue is that, despite being a hypervisor, the Hyper-V software still requires Windows Server 2008 on the host server. To this end a cut-down ($28) Hyper-V Server implementation has been announced; however, as with Hyper-V itself, no firm dates have been given as to when this will be released.

More information and the release candidate of Hyper-V are available from the link below.