So, I finally got around to burning an ISO of Hyper-V Server and installing it on my new dev box. So far, I'm extremely impressed:
-- It installs *really* quickly... including reboots and first-time login, it took me under ten minutes!
-- It's a lightweight Hypervisor, so it leaves plenty of hardware resources for your actual VMs (and boots really quickly too)
-- It includes important stuff from Windows, like the ability to manage it in a domain, driver support, patching, etc...
-- It has a cute little CLI-based admin interface for configuring the basics
-- You can dump out to the command-line to do anything you'd nromally accomplish via the CLI on Windows Server -- although Powershell is *not* included
That last item is particularly exciting for me; maybe it's the old VMS admin in me, but I *love* having a box running the NT kernel that has no real GUI, which I can run totally headless and administer remotely via MMC and RDP.
I'll post more about it as I get my VMs migrated over -- right now, I'm waiting for an NTFS format of a big disk to finish up.