Microsoft is all out in the Type 1 (bare metal) Hypervisor battle and they are giving it out for free. Sure, for installation of 5 or more Hyper-V servers, your life could be easier if you know PowerShell or if you get the System Centre. But still, Hyper-V is free
Free means no revenue? Surly Microsoft is not the type of company that needs to give free stuff, so why it’s free? They are spending lots in engineering and marketing and they give it away for free.
In my opinion, the reason is quite simple. The Type 1 hypervisor is what interacts with the hardware. So far Windows is the defector OS (client or server) so hardware vendors make sure that each new piece of hardware released does have Windows Drivers. Linux, VMware and others struggle for that. An OS without drivers is, well nothing. So by having the hardware vendors themselves writing the drives for Windows, Microsoft is is a very great position. Microsoft is the defacto standard.
Type 1 hypervisor changes this. It’s the Hypervisor that interacts with the hardware. The VM’s has drivers to talk to the hypervisor and not to the hardware. Who wins the Type 1 Hypervisor battle will be the defacto standard. It’s not an option for Microsoft to lose this status.
This explains that massive drive, in engineering, Microsoft has been putting in Hyper-V. As Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) tweeted a few days, Microsoft Azure is running on Hyper-V. That’s how good Hyper-V became.
For us customers, that’s a good thing. We get excellent, free Type 1 hypervisor.
Philip B Cortis 