Yet another leap towards virtualization. Microsoft Corp.’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced the final release and availability of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 in front of a crowd of 700 IT professionals during a TechNet Server and Tools event keynote address in London.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone hypervisor-based server virtualization product that allows customers to virtualize multiple operating systems onto a single physical server.

Hyper-V Server can be freely downloaded at: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 (937MB) and the configuration guide is available here.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server is supported on Windows Server 2008. The guest operating systems can range from Windows Server series to Linux distributions. A complete list of supported guest operating systems is available here. To use Microsoft Hyper-V Server, you need 64-bit enabled hardware which supports hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V) technology.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server will be available as a free download. CALs are only required for Windows Server and all Windows Server images that are virtualized, regardless of virtualization platform. No CALs are required for Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

A complete set of FAQ's is avaliable here.

Homepage of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx