Hyper-V has been Released To Manufacturing!

I arrived on this team a little over three years ago, and was brought in to work on automating test cases for Virtual Server.

While I was doing that, I heard rumblings and rumors about a little project code-named "Viridian".  A lot of the developers on the Virtualization team here in Redmond had already started working on various parts of the project, and I was looking forward to the day that I could start playing with it myself.  Over time, more of the team was gradually migrated to the "Viridian" project, including myself.  It was exciting to hear about all of the things that we were planning to do.  And over the years, the excitement never stopped.

I can still remember the day that we finally got DOS to boot (that was the first OS that Hyper-V ever booted, aside from a test microkernel that we'd developed).
I can still remember the day that Windows actually booted.
I can still remember the day that Windows x64 actually booted and joined the domain.
And I can still remember the day that setup - (well, the first incarnation of setup - you have no idea how many there have been) - actually worked, and produced a system that could boot VMs without me having to go in and change some registry keys.

Today, in our daily shiproom meeting, we signed off on the RTM build of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.  The RTM bits should be available around noon PST (which was about 45 minutes ago...) on the Microsoft Download Center, and will be available on Windows Update on July 8th.

Instead of posting links, I'll like to John Howard's blog, since he's got some tremendous information there about where to get the RTM bits, and some things to keep in mind while upgrading.

I'll be back next week with some updates to my "Hyper-V Installation Tricks" posts for RTM, and I'll even include videos of each of the steps.

And with that, I'm going to go to the ship party.