Microsoft has today made the final release version its long awaited Hyper-V server virtualisation software available free for download from its website.

From 7th July, companies running Windows Server 2008 will have the hypervisor, which allows one physical server to divide its system resources to create multiple virtual machines (VMs), downloaded to their servers as part of the operating system's automatic update facility.

As well as the Hyper-V hypervisor itself, Microsoft is also offering a virtualisation planning tool and assessment kit to help organisations plan any first move to server virtualisation technology.

Hyper-V was originally promised to ship in Windows Server 2008 in February this year, though the OS release itself was delayed from 2007.

Other companies, including VMWare, Red Hat, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Citrix have offered server virtualisation hypervisors and management tools based either on their own technology or the XenSource open source hypervisor for some time, leaving Microsoft with a lot of catching up to do.

The established market leader VMware, which launched its first server virtualisation product in 2001, already claims more than 100,000 customers worldwide, as well as 14,000 industry partners that have certified their applications to run on VMWare virtual machines.

VMWare may retain an edge on features and virtua machine performance, but Microsoft will use the fact that Hyper-V will be available free and integrated into its Windows Server 2008 operating system as its primary sales hook. This is backed by links to its System Centre management suite which the company says will make virtual machines easier to monitor and control.

“I think Hyper-V will initially co-exist [with VMWare], but with the Microsoft Systems Centre virtual machine manager, organisations can manage their virtual environments more efficiently and at a better price,” said Bill Laing general manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server division. “Also, it is just Windows so the IT team does not need to know two different environments”.

Though the majority of organisations that have already deployed virtualisation have used VMWare, large numbers have yet to implement any form of the technology and are now being pushed to do so by power consumption and environmental concerns.

“There are strong themes around power saving as well as performance. Customers typically run their servers under light loads, and virtualisation allows them to take two machines and consolidate them into one,” said Laing.

A small number of UK customers have already made the move to using Hyper-V, including oil company BP, though details were not available at the time of writing. Roger Killick, an IT Manager at Siemens Standard Drives, the operational manufacturing unit of Siemens automation and drives business based in Congleton, Cheshire is one.

“Virtualisation has helped us to improve availability by reducing the dependencies on specific hardware, assisting with our disaster recovery plans, and at the same time reducing our space and energy requirements,” he said in a statement. “ The ongoing migration to Hyper-V on Windows 2008 Server Core is also reducing the virtualisation support issues, by making virtualisation a skill amongst the support team, rather than a specific role.”