Forum Discussion
Hyper-V Server 2022
Free 'Microsoft Hyper-V Server' product update
Since its introduction over a decade ago in Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V technology has been, and continues to be, the foundation of Microsoft’s hypervisor platform. Hyper-V is a strategic technology for Microsoft. Microsoft continues to invest heavily in Hyper-V for a variety of scenarios such as virtualization, security, containers, gaming, and more. Hyper-V is used in Azure, Azure Local, Windows Server, Windows Client, and Xbox among others.
Starting with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019, the free ‘Microsoft Hyper-V Server’ product has been deprecated and is the final version of that product. Hyper-V Server 2019 is a free product available for download from the Microsoft Evaluation Center: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 will continue to be supported under its lifecycle policy until January 2029, see this link for additional information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/hyperv-server-2019.
While Microsoft has made a business decision to no longer offer the free 'Microsoft Hyper-V Server' product, this has no impact to the many other products which include the Hyper-V feature and capabilities. This change has no impact to any customers who use Windows Server or Azure Local.
For customers looking to do test or evaluation of the Hyper-V feature, Azure Local includes a 60-day free trial and can be downloaded here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-local/ . Windows Server offers a free 180-day evaluation which can be downloaded from the Evaluation Center here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter
Microsoft remains committed to meeting customers where they are and delivering innovation for on-premises virtualization and bringing unique hybrid capabilities like no other can combined with the power of Azure Arc. We are announcing that Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 was the last version of the free download product and that customers begin transitioning to one of the several other products which include Hyper-V or consider Azure.
Thank you,
Elden Christensen
Principal Group PM Manager
Windows Server Development Team
MicrosoftAzure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s premier hypervisor offering for running virtual machines on-premises. For testing and evaluation purposes Azure Stack HCI includes a 60-day free trial and can be downloaded here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack/hci/hci-download/
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 will continue to be supported under its lifecycle policy until January 2029, see this link for additional information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/hyperv-server-2019
Hyper-V platform has always been a free and reliable platform, allowing home-grown solutions and business platforms to operate on a hypervisor infrastructure with a minimal feature set. From a single laptop for lab or educational use to a fleet of pizza box servers in a datacenter, a free hypervisor should cost nothing. If you use no cloud infrastructure, no management automation, no other infrastructure, the base hypervisor should be free.
As an MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, I am incredibly disappointed in this decision.
I've invested lots of time and effort in learning to build secure scalable solutions for on premise infrastructure. This flies in the face of that time and investment and leaves me feeling like I've wasted that time by trusting Microsoft's platform and vision.
As an architect who builds on premise platforms, I am incredibly disappointed in this decision.
One of the key value propositions for free hyper-v server was not requriing extra licensing for extra management servers, etc.... If you have a windows server licensed cluster of hypervisors with windows server datacenter, not requiring additional licensing to run extra physical servers with linux or other guest VMs in a non clustered environment (such as Palo Alto firewalls, Linux VDI, VPN virtual machines, logging machines, and other platforms that utilize application layer redundancy not requiring highly available "VMs", Hyper-v server was a great solution.
As a decision maker who decides bills of materials and application architecture, I am incredibly disappointed in this decision.
I guess we will now be moving everything to VMWare. What a waste.
- You won't be the only one, friend
- I have just started using TrueNAS SCALE which recently hit release and it's the best replacement I have found yet. The point being, there is a lot of other competition out there, Microsoft should have kept this up, because now they will lose market share.
- Hello !
Do you have public social place (like discord, forum, etc) where we can speak about that?
I recently try truenas scale (to replace Ovios), but I never imagine it was good for hypervising...
So, i'm very interessed by your experience.
Thank in advance !
