What is Hyper-V server???

It's been a couple weeks now since Microsoft announced Hyper-V Server, but I wanted to take a minute and boil down what the product really does and doesn't do.

Ok, what does it do? Well, a couple of things:
· Loads a driver set and base OS that you host virtual machines on. No UI, no extra services. It only hosts VMs that you manage from another machine, either using the Hyper-V Management console or Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

· Host VMs. Windows VMs. Linux VMs. Host pretty much whatever VMs you can get to run.

· Comes to you free of charge. Yup, free download.

Ok, what doesn’t it do? Hey, what do you expect for the price of $0?
· Come with licenses. Every Windows VM you run needs a server license. By comparison, Server 2008 Standard comes with one free VM, Server 2008 Enterprise comes with 4, and Server 2008 Datacenter? Unlimited. As many as your hardware can run, all included.

· Clustering. Say you want to have virtual machines failover from one physical host to another. You need Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V.

Can’t you put all this info in a nice, easy to read chart? I could, but someone else already did it for me: