I have often fretted about the lack of 64 bit Virtualization capabilities on Windows Client OSs (aka Win7). Fret no more. This is coming to an end with the next generation of Windows Operating ssytems - called Windows 8. In the Windows 8 blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b8 at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx the windows team has just announced this.

This is REALLY awesome and cool for the techno geeks and non-geeks alike because you can run all of the 64 bit stack on your desktop itself whenever you want to quickly say spin up a 64 bit server OS and do some development, verification or testing. Earlier most of us used to have the laptops set to dual boot to Win 7 and also Windows Server 2008 64bit (to run Hyper-V etc.,. ). You should no longer have to do that as almost the full Hyper-V capabilities are coming to the Desktop version of the Windows 8 OS.

MAJOR SCENARIOS: (from the blog above)

  • Hyper-V enables developers to easily maintain multiple test environments and provides a simple mechanism to quickly switch between these environments without incurring additional hardware costs. For example, we release pre-configured virtual machines containing old versions of Internet Explorer to support web developers.
  • The IT administrator gets the additional benefit of virtual machine parity and a common management experience across Hyper-V in Windows Server and Windows Client.
  • We also know that many of you use virtualization to try out new things without risking changes to the PC you are actively using

MAJOR FEATURES (again from the above blog)

  • Dynamic RAM Allocation - very sweet indeed, with unused RAM being shared by VMs.
  • Live Storage Moves - move your VMs across storage without having to stop them.
  • Remote Connections to the VM
  • Snapshotting of the VMs. You could not do this earlier on Windows Client OS. Now you can.
  • Virtually network the VMs to your heart's content.

There is also a VIDEO on the above linked blog post. Sure to watch it.