The Microsoft Windows Virtualisation team has posted a blog entry on the top 5 things you need to know about Hyper-V. It covers:
- The Hyper-V architecture and how it performs much better than Virtual PC or Virtual Server. It’s a hypervisor with a very slim architecture making it much faster.
- Snapshots – Yes! Hyper-V has snapshots just like we lab rats have been using in VMware Workstation for years. It’s quite fast too, even on a less than recommended disk specification.
- Quick Migration – No, it is not VMotion and we likely won’t see "live migration" for a few years in Hyper-V. Question you have to ask yourself is: do you really need it? Think about why you would willingly move a VM in ESX (not failover because both products are essentially the same here).
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008: Offers that layer of management that ESX admins associate with Virtual Center. However, it integrates with SCOM 2007 and can manage Virtual Server and ESX.
- Hyper-V can run on Server Core. This minimises your resource requirements for the parent partition, reduces the attack surface and reduces the numbers of possible patches.