By Emil Protalinski | Last updated August 31, 2009 7:20 PM CT
arstechnica.com
The final release of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (1541.1MB) has been posted on the Microsoft Download Center. This release of Microsoft’s standalone virtualization server for small- and mid-sized business customers is a vast improvement over the first version. Here are a few of the new features the software giant is listing for R2:
- Support for physical computers with up to 8 physical processors
- Support for 64 logical processors and for running up to 384 virtual machines with up to 512 virtual processors
- Support for using up to 1TB of physical memory (virtual machines can use up to 64GB each)
- Support for clustering
- Support for live migration
- Support for CPU Core Parking, which allows Windows and Hyper-V to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of possible processor cores, and suspends inactive processor cores.
- Support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) in CPUs. On Intel processors this is called “EPT” while AMD calls it “NPT.” SLAT adds a second level of paging below the architectural x86/x64 paging tables in x86/x64 processors, providing an indirection layer from virtual machine memory access to the physical memory access. In many virtualization scenarios, hardware based SLAT support can offer performance improvements.
- Support for VMQ, Chimney, Jumbo Frames and other networking enhancements
- The ability to hot add / remove SCSI virtual hard disks
The first version of Hyper-V arrived in June 2008, and just like that one, this release is free. For more information, check out Hyper-V’s homepage on Microsoft.com as well as the detailed list of Supported Guest Operating Systems.
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