For a couple of days now, I’ve been itching to write something about the Microsoft Hyper-V release candidate (RC), which was made available to beta testers earlier this week. Well, the wait is over as the (feature-complete) product was officially announced earlier today.

According to Microsoft:

The RC forms an important milestone in the development of Hyper-V and being feature complete, customers can now start to evaluate the final implementation scenarios with the knowledge that the upgrade path to the RTM of Hyper-V will be largely non-disruptive in terms of VM settings, VHDs, etc. In this release candidate of Hyper-V, there are 3 new areas of improvement including:

• An expanded list of tested and qualified guest operating systems including: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.
• Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter – with English, partial German, and partial Japanese language options now available and the ability to enable the English version of Hyper-V on other locales.
• Improved performance & stability for scalability and throughput workloads.

I’ll be upgrading my Hyper-V installations over the coming weeks but even running the beta has been a remarkably good experience, although so far I’ve failed to get the Linux integration components working (on SUSE or RHEL, 32 or 64-bit). I’m also pleased that Microsoft has released Hyper-V management tools for Windows Vista SP1, removing the requirement for another Hyper-V server in order to manage Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 server core installation.

There’s more information on the Hyper-V RC at the Windows Virtualization team blog and in the official press release.