On the Windows Server Division blog, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager of Windows Server Marketing, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will reach the RTM milestone the same time of Windows 7.
Both will be generally available on October 22, 2009.
The big question is when Hyper-V 2.0 will be available then.
At the time of Hyper-V 1.0 Microsoft decided to include just a beta version of the hypervisor inside the Windows Server 2008 final code, and to subsequently update it to RTM using the Windows Update services.
The official explanation for this was that the virtualization team could fine-tune the hypervisor only after the operating system was finalized, as the former is embedded into the latter.
This year is different: Hyper-V 2.0 RTM will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, as virtualization.info has learned directly from the company.
And this means of course that the hypervisor will be broadly available starting on October 22.
The only edition of Hyper-V 2.0 that will be delayed is the stand-alone platform Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, which Microsoft will release within 30 days the release of Windows Server 2008 R2.
All the Microsoft partners will have access to Hyper-V 2.0 starting the second half of July, probably through MSDN and TechNet software subscriptions.
It’s clear that the company wants to be ready to show its new live migration in time for the VMworld 2009, even if this year nobody knows yet how much can be seen beyond VMware stuff.