Hyper-V

Hyper-V comes in 2 flavors

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Standalone Hyper-V server is free to use. The Hyper-V management console has to be from Windows paid products like Windows server 2008 R2.

If you want a reasonable working system, install Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and use the Hyper-V console that comes with it.

The following servers run happily on Hyper-V

1. Windows 2003 32 bit
2. Windows 2003 64 bit
3. windows 2008 32 bit
4. Windows 2008 64 bit
5. Windows SBS 2003 32 bit
6. Windows SBS 2008 64 bit

Caveats (or known limitations)

1. The mouse don't work on remote desktop to Hyper-V console (I would prefer vmware esx/esxi to over come this shortcoming)
   
2. Grub4Dos based boot system has trouble under Hyper-V (This is not an issue with vmware esx/esxi)
   

There are many demo video for installing, configuring and using Hyper-V on YouTube.

Few learning

1. Make sure VT enabled in BIOS
2. Make sure you connect to Legacy Network (non-default) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770380.aspx
3. Dell PowerEdge 1950 (1U) and 2950 (2U) are known good candidates for hosting Hyper-V