Wow this is pretty darn cool..in the latest leaked build of Windows 8 x64, a blogger found Hyper-V 3.0 is baked in and is sporting a number of new features. This is the first time MS has baked in a hypervisor to a client operating system. While some of the new features aren’t really relevant to a desktop user (like a virtual fibre channel adapter) or 16TB VDHX files with power fail resiliency, it does open up a world of possibilities for handling application compatibility issues. For the more geeky folks that like to use a type-2 hypervisor like VMware Workstation, there’s finally a MS solution for running 64-bit VMs on your desktop operating system.
You can check out all of the new features and some screen shots here. A short summary of enhancements include:
- Support for more than four cores
- Virtual Machine Queue and IPsec offload
- Bandwidth management
- DHCP Guard
- Router Guard
- Monitor Port
- Virtual Switch extensions
- Network Resource Pools
Since Windows 8 RTM isn’t expected until mid to late 2012, there is plenty of time for Microsoft to add additional features. Of course Microsoft could also pull Hyper-V 3.0 from the client OS too, but let’s hope not.
