Microsoft has announced the official release of its hypervisor product Hyper-V.

The release, which comes ahead of a previously delayed schedule, marks the software giant’s entrance into the red-hot virtualisation market.

The hypervisor – a small slice of code that decouples physical machines from the software that runs on them, the very basis for virtualisation – is available to download today from the company’s website.

It is available free to Windows Server 2008 licence holders or for $28 as a standalone product. That price is way below the cost of competitive products such as VMware’s ESX hypervisor, the lowest list price for which is $495.

This promises to radically affect the economics of virtualisation, and threatens VMware’s early lead in the virtualisation market.

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of systems management technology provider Parallels, told Information Age that “while we’re excited, the news is likely to be seen far less positively by vendors who rely on highly priced hypervisors for their revenue”.

“It is going to undercut the other established hypervisor tools, potentially representing a very serious threat for those companies,” he said.

But he added that the functionality of Hyper-V is limited compared to some higher-value products.

“The feature set of Hyper-V is limited; for example, there is no live migration, which is a fairly basic entry-level requirement for virtualisation adopters,” Beloussov added. “Platform support is also key, and there’s a big deficit here, with no support provided for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS or FreeBSD.”

Hyper-V was originally slated for release alongside the company’s Windows Server 2008 operating system that shipped earlier this year, but was subsequently delayed until August.

Further reading

Microsoft's virtual balancing act Virtualisation is arguably the hottest race in software. So why is Microsoft stuck in the pits? May 2007

A virtual operation How the Royal College of Physicians cut its hardware requirements by four-fifths

Parallels out from under the radar The virtualisation and systems management tool provider is emerging from the shadows

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