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
XCP-NG or VMware are your big two choices. There are others such as VirtualBox and KEMU.
VMware has free options. XCP-NG is not 'too difficult', you just need to play with it and you'll find your knowledge with hv will translate over.
Hyperv is dead, we're moving on to a post-Microsoft Era in the hypervisor arena. They can't articulate what their plans for smb are beyond the original stated Azure Stack - which by extension excludes the entire smb market so, so the sooner you get moving the better.
I have looked into both XCP-NG and Proxmox. Both are good options. XCP-NG is good if you have several Physical host servers to manage and are connected via. LAN or site-to-site VPN (or SSH tunnel), but it doesn't have a package manager to install your own tools locally.
Proxmox is good if you want the Physical host servers to be managed independently, it has plenty built in tools to do so and is built on Debian so you can add more.
With Hyper-V Server I used to install Windows Admin Center and before that a Management PC operating as a Workgroup not a Domain to manage it, so for me, Proxmox is the closest match.