Looks Like Microsoft Is Dumping Stand-alone Hyper-V Server

[Jcx500]

Looks like Microsoft isn’t going to be releasing the free edition of Hyper-v in the future with 2019 being the last version.

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-insiders/hyper-v-server-2022/m-p/2652790

[Norphy]

It makes sense.

 

The thing that’s always confused me about Hyper-V Server is, who is it meant for? I mean, if you want to run a Windows Server, you’ll already have a Windows license of some description to run Hyper-V. Hyper-V Server is pretty much identical to Windows Server Core with just the Hyper-V feature enabled, so why bother it for that?

 

Windows 10 Enterprise/Edu also includes Hyper-V and a license to run a virtual copy, so it’s not really worth it for a dev environment.

 

That just leaves open source operating systems and frankly, there are better choices to run those, which are also free. Hyper-V is ok for a couple of distros but if you’re only running Linux/BSD, you’re better using ESXi, Xen or KVM.

 

The only time I’ve ever used Hyper-V is when the servers it was being installed it on didn’t have internal storage and the only supported version of Windows Server at the time to run off USB storage was Hyper-V Server

 

There’s a tiny market for Hyper-V Server and I reckon Microsoft have decided it’s not worth the development/support resources any more.

Edited August 26, 2021 by Norphy

[localzuk]

There's also the aspect of them trying to tie everything in to Azure - so any future versions of their virtualisation stuff will likely tie directly in to Azure, and a free version of Hyper-V doesn't really fit.

[Davit2005]

The theory of the Hyper-V server was OK but I can see a point. I can see having a non-GUI interface on a hypervisor in a way is appealing as you won't have any ability to use it as a download platform and less chance of anyone else downloading some random application to run on it either :-)

 

However it was a complete pain to manage from what I found and if you run MS servers and pay for licenses anyway very little point. It had advantages if you wanted to run linux only but I think if you are doing that you'd prob want to use a unix/linux based hypervisor in the first place KVM, ProxMox, XCP-NG, ZenServer, etc or going VMWare

Edited August 26, 2021 by Davit2005

[mavhc]

Proxmox all the things. ZFS makes backups insanely easy.

 

It's very easy to switch from HyperV to Proxmox, install it on new disks, mount ntfs disk, convert VMs, import new drive files into Proxmox.

 

Reason to use HyperV Server over Windows Server is security, you don't have 100 things you don't need, and have to reboot less often

[Norphy]

Reason to use HyperV Server over Windows Server is security, you don't have 100 things you don't need, and have to reboot less often

 

That’s nonsense. Hyper-V Server is just Windows Server Core with only the Hyper-V and Failover Clustering features available. It still runs on the same patching schedule so the number of reboots is going to be the same. Security is going to be the same as Server Core.

 

Yes, if you’re running Hyper-V on Windows Server with a GUI then you might have a point, but even then a bare Windows Server GUI install is fairly minimal these days.

[Jcx500]

That’s nonsense. Hyper-V Server is just Windows Server Core with only the Hyper-V and Failover Clustering features available. It still runs on the same patching schedule so the number of reboots is going to be the same. Security is going to be the same as Server Core.

 

Yes, if you’re running Hyper-V on Windows Server with a GUI then you might have a point, but even then a bare Windows Server GUI install is fairly minimal these days.

 

I agree

 

I’ve always installed the gui for hyper-v because it’s still a type1 hypervisor. As long as you only install hyper-v and nothing else the attack surface is still quite small.

[mavhc]

That’s nonsense. Hyper-V Server is just Windows Server Core with only the Hyper-V and Failover Clustering features available. It still runs on the same patching schedule so the number of reboots is going to be the same. Security is going to be the same as Server Core.

 

Yes, if you’re running Hyper-V on Windows Server with a GUI then you might have a point, but even then a bare Windows Server GUI install is fairly minimal these days.

 

Right, compared to Desktop version of Windows Server.

 

Although it's amusing that people think Hyper-V/Core doesn't have a GUI, given it can run Notepad, and from there you can do File>Open and get to what's basically Windows Explorer.

 

Microsoft seems to have given up making it any smaller though

[jmcdermott]

They do make good servers if you need a free OS to host some files shares\VHDs