Microsoft today hustled its delayed Hyper-V hypervisor software out the door.

The software giant’s virtualisation technology, originally codenamed Viridian, should have been bundled with Microsoft's latest server product which was released in February.

But a number of “challenges and bugs” in Hyper-V forced the company to postpone its release date by a significant margin, even though – prior to launch – Microsoft had bigged up the technology as a major component of Windows Server 2008.

In February, virtualisation market leader VMWare made hay from Microsoft’s misfortune by signing a number of deals with OEMs including Hewlett-Packard and Dell to ship machines pre-installed with its software.

By March, despite Hyper-V remaining in beta, Microsoft managed to tie up pre-install agreements with HP, Dell, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, among others, all of whom planned to load Hyper-V on their servers.

Today, Microsoft broke the seal on Hyper-V, which has been designed to allow people to run multiple virtual machines on a single machine, by finally releasing it to manufacturers.

Hyper-V supports guest operating system clients including Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1 and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Microsoft will be patting itself on the back, though. It had pencilled in mid-August as the rough date when the software would finally land – so by its reckoning Hyper-V has come two months early to market. ®

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