Microsoft's virtualization hypervisor product has seen its share of delays, but now, it looks as though the product is right on track and could even be out sooner than last expected. Today, the company put out a release candidate of Hyper-V that provides updated, near-final code. According to Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager for virtualization strategy, "This milestone is important to the hundreds of custo Microsoft’s virtualization hypervisor product has seen its share of delays, but now, it looks as though the product is right on track and could even be out sooner than last expected. Today, the company put out a release candidate of Hyper-V that provides updated, near-final code.According to Mike Neil, Microsoft’s general manager for virtualization strategy, “This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your own, because it’s feature complete, better performing than the beta, and you’ll have a better experience using it.”Neil published on his blog that external deployments have exceeded Beta coverage goals and external TAP deployments have increased significantly. And amongst the early adopter customers, the three most common Windows Server 2008 roles run within Hyper-V are IIS, application server and Terminal Services. Microsoft is reporting that the release candidate features an expanded list of tested and qualified guest operating systems, which now includes Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 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, German and Japanese language options available as well as enablement of Hyper-V on international locales, and further language options and support available in the final release. In addition, the release candidate comes with support for more hardware configurations and offers improved performance and scalability. It also includes the option for installing Hyper-V Manager Microsoft Management Console on Windows Vista SP1 for remote management.As Hyper-V’s release draws closer, announcements of third-party add-on solutions will begin to come out in support of the new hypervisor as well.One such solution has already been announced from virtual lab management provider Surgient who has been providing a similar solution for Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware ESX Server for years. “Surgient has seen growing customer interest in adding support for Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to our virtual lab management software so that our mutual customers can streamline application life cycle operations, reducing capital and operating expenses,” said Tim Lucas, president and CEO of Surgient Inc. “Our customers need to be able to replicate production application configurations in virtual labs using any virtual or physical infrastructure. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V delivers in all these areas, and we’re excited to add support for it to our virtual lab management platform.”Customers and partners can download the release candidate, here. And if you are already operating the Beta version, it is expected that the Windows Update service should refresh your copy to the latest release. Software Development