The first details about the third version of Hyper-V and the overall Microsoft vision for it appeared online yesterday on a French publication.
Apparently, Hyper-V 3.0 will be integrated in Windows 8 too, working as a client hypervisor (an interesting scenario considering the new VMware’s position about type-1 VMMs for offline VDI).
According to the article, Hyper-V 3.0 will not run a full copy of Windows 8 in its parent partition, but a minimal part of the OS internally codenamed MinWin.
MinWin is subset of Windows that exists since Vista. It includes the OS kernel, the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the file system and the networking support. In one of its iterations it had a disk footprint of 25MB and a RAM footprint of 40MB, according to several information released by Microsoft in 2007 and 2008.
Codename MinWin is smaller than the Windows Server Core edition.
On top of that, Hyper-V will be somehow integrated with App-V in Windows 8 to allow customers to run XP, Vista, 7 and even Linux applications on the same environment.