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
Hi Adam -
Yes, right after I hit "Post" I saw your edit - all good, of course, I think everyone here, including both Microsoft and myself, just wants to make sure everyone is taken care of as best we can.
To your follow up question: Forgive me if you know all this already, but, for context: Licensing requirements and Activation requirements are not exactly the same thing. Activation is a technical process. If you are doing machine level replication using HyperV or XCPNG, it is likely (depending on how you do it and how your hypervisor works) that replication will preserve the activation status of the source host, so that the destination host will already be activated if and when you fire it up. It is also possible that activation status will be lost, in which case the host will attempt to re-activate when it's fired up - and that will happen automatically if an Internet connection exists. In either case you should generally not have to do anything like applying a new product key to the target server regardless of hypervisor. It should all "just work".
In contrast, licensing is a legal process. You have to have paid for, and own, in some legal way, enough Windows Server/CPU licenses to make all of your machines legal. I suppose that in your case, where you are only running two live machines, and the replication targets are never running and never used and just sitting there waiting for a disaster that we hope never happens - in that case you might not need a second license for those machines since you're not "using" them (as quoted from the document) - but again I am not a lawyer and cannot answer that authoritatively.
But I guess my point was that whether you need a second license or not is not related to the choice of HyperV Server vs any of the other hypervisor options mentioned in the thread, so the loss of HyperV Server won't change your operating costs in any way. Regardless of how many legal licenses you actually need, that number remains the same whether you're on HyperV or ESX or whatever. (The only exception to that of course would be if you upgraded to Datacenter for the physical boxes, in which case you wouldn't need anything else beyond that... other than CALs or whatever, of course.)
In any event, to answer your question, no, whether HyperV, or Datacenter, or XCPNG, you should not need to change anything or do anything if disaster strikes: your backup machines, when brought online, will either already be activated, or will attempt to self-activate online, and either way it should be transparent. Only if your product keys run out of activations will you get a warning; in which case you just call Microsoft's licensing center humans and explain it to them, and they'll fix it for you... often while you wait.
I hope this is helpful!
Glen
MicrosoftElden_Christensen
If you guys are still monitoring this thread, I recently thought of a solution that may be of interest to you.So Hyper-V Server Standalone is officially discontinued, but in the last couple years, Linux kernel patches have been put out to be able to make Linux the root partition for a Hyper-V Installation.
So if Microsoft pushed out the rest of what would be necessary to make an on-premises installation of Hyper-V with a Linux root partition, then I think that would satisfy most everyone here.
You could even package it yourself with the official Microsoft Linux distributions CBL-Mariner and/or CBL-Delridge and call it Hyper-V Server again if you wanted to, but this time, there'd be no Windows components. Just raw Hyper-V and Linux.
I'd say the ability to manage it via Powershell in Linux, and some way to connect to the console of a VM would be all we'd really need for a Linux based Hyper-V solution.
Either way, I'd say the pushing of patches to the Linux Kernel implies that this will happen sooner or later, but doing it sooner, and making it the new direction of Hyper-V Server would probably be more than enough to satisfy us dissidents in this thread.Elden_Christensen you have unmasked yourself! Haha! Now you will never be left alone!!! Well since you're here let me re-iterate, speaking officially only for myself, but I hope for many here, that despite the bumps over changes, I am grateful for your help and patience in this thread, and for all you and Microsoft are doing to make the IT world a better place for all of us. You and your team deserve a big thank you, and you certainly have that from me! So THANK YOU!
AdamB2395 You are very welcome. I hope I could help in some small way. I hope your future plans work out well and - who knows - as Elden states, Microsoft is listening, so it will be interesting to see what the future brings as well!
Best regards to you both,
Glen
- Hi Elden,
Thanks for acknowledging that.
Kind regards.
