Following the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft India has announced the global launch of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualisation offering that will play a key role in delivering virtualisation solutions to customers. The launch of Hyper-V takes forward Microsoft's vision to provide enterprises with a mission critical virtualisation offering that will allow them to improve server utilisation and progress towards achieving self-managing IT infrastructures. Hyper-V is currently available as a feature with select editions of Windows Server 2008. The final version of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V.

At the time of launch, over 130 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have certified a total of 150 applications on Windows Server 2008. Symantec, Diskeeper and IBM are the first three vendors to achieve the new 'Certified for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V' designation. This designation identifies applications that have been independently tested to exploit Hyper-V capabilities and meet mission-critical expectations in a virtualised environment.  In addition, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) such as Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun Microsystems and Unisys are already qualified to ship and create systems with Hyper-V. In all, 250 systems from server and white-box vendors are also logo-qualified for Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

"With the availability of Hyper-V, customers can use Microsoft's virtualisation software to deliver the right computing resources to people anytime and anywhere", said Pallavi Kathuria, director - Server Business Group, Microsoft India.

Hyper-V offers a reliable, scalable and high-performance virtualisation platform that plugs into the customer’s existing IT infrastructures and helps them consolidate demanding workloads. As a hypervisor-based server virtualisation technology, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V allows customers to make the best use of their server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate Virtual Machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, users can also run multiple operating systems on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.