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Comment by dorianj | Hacker News Reader

Despite Microsoft's what late entry into robust virtualization, they've really put together a solid product quickly. I've found it much easier to use casually than KVM or Xen, and the Linux support is surprising quite good.

The integration into client versions of Windows will be quite welcomed by software developers who need to test on multiple versions of Windows.

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Have you tried Virtual Box and VMWare in addition to KVM and Xen? I am very happy with Virtual Box when I need to do something Windows-only. I only use Xen and KVM on servers. The run very well in headless boxes.

BTW, isn't Hyper-V somewhat related to Virtual-PC, the product Microsoft got when they acquired Connectix? If that's the case, it's one of the first desktop virtualization technologies. I used it extensively on my Macs in the early 2000's.

As an aside, the Virtual-PC of 2007 or so could run Linux, and the one distributed (in a somewhat hard to find page) in 2010 can't.

Yup, Microsoft acquired Connectix, and Hyper-V evolved out of VirtualPC. In fact, a few of the connectix guys still work on Hyper-V.

Hyper-V isn't late to the party at all, it's been out for 2 years already. Unfortunately, for some idiotic reason they decided not to enable Hyper-V support in the desktop client OS.

> for some idiotic reason

Selling more costly licenses is not idiotic from their point-of-view.

They could have bundled it into a higher cost SKU of Windows 7, it would have almost certainly made them more money.

MS already has too many SKUs for Win7. I always assumed serious MS developers would just acquire the Big MSDN subscription and just install the server OS on their computers. Back when I was a Windows developer, I always used server versions of the OS. I think 2000 Server was the last one. When I moved to XP I was already moving to Linux, so I never used 2003 on my box.

It's mainly due to the lack of human resources (e.g. engineers, testers, PMs, and etc.) You have to understand that the Hyper-V was a extremely team (less than 100 people) during the Win7 time frame.

At the time, the team's #1 priority was to make a product that is competitive to VMWare on the enterprise level. Therea re additional issues and overhead associated with porting Hyper-V to the client SKU's. And they simply did not have the time or the resource to do so.

Now, they are able to bring Hyper-V to Win8 (the client SKUs) since they have a bigger team and more resources at their disposal.

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