Microsoft has finally released, as promised, the Microsoft Hyper-V, which is is a hypervisor based virtualization system for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008. The Redmond company initially planned to launch the software embedded into the Windows Server 2008, but apparently the work on the product was not quite over yet and Microsoft promised it would release it within 180 days of the Server 2008 launch.

Thus, Hyper-V RTM was officially released yesterday, on June 26, 2008, about a month before the self-imposed deadline. The software runs exclusively on an x64 version of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, and can run guest operating systems, both 32-bit and 64-bit, which include Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server SP4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (excluding Home editions) and Windows XP Professional SP3.

Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy at Microsoft, explained that in order to truly see the benefits of virtualization, it is critical to have the right processes and tools in place. In order to allow partners and customers to assess whether their servers are good candidates for virtualization with Hyper-V, Microsoft also released the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.1 Beta.

In addition to that, Microsoft also released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta in order to help customers best configure and deploy their hypervisor-based environments.

The new software, which also comes with hardware requirements such as hardware-assisted virtualization and Hardware Data Execution Protection (DEP), is available for download now and will hit Microsoft/Windows Update on July 8.