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 Chris,
Thank you for pointing that out. I wasn't aware of the existence of Software Assurance and will now be looking into that further.
A follow up question for you: does this only apply to replications made by Hyper-V Server? Or replications made by any software whatsoever?
In other words: is another license or Software Assurance required to have any kind of DR at all, regardless of the software being used to replicate/backup the primary server?
Kind regards.
Hi AdamB2395,
If I understand the product terms correctly, it applies to replication situations within any hypervisor product, if the purpose of the replication is to temporarily run the 'backup' replicated virtual machine in the event of disaster recovery.
In the general Microsoft product terms for all products there is this statement on 'License Assignment and Reassignment':
'Before Customer uses software under a License, it must assign that License to a device or user, as appropriate. Customer may reassign a License to another device or user, but not less than 90 days since the last reassignment of that same License, unless the reassignment is due to (i) permanent hardware failure or loss... (the other reasons are irrelevant here). Customer must remove the software or block access from the former device or to the former user. '
https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/en-US/product/ForallSoftware/OVOVS
There is nothing against creating a backup of a virtual machine that is never run (after all, that's just normal backup procedure) - but in order to run that backup on a separate piece of hardware, you either need to formally reassign the license to the new product - which involves removing the software or blocking access from the former device - and then you have to bear in mind the rules above that you can't transfer back for another 90 days, unless the reassignment is due to permanent hardware loss - or you could make your life simple and obtain Software Assurance to gain the Disaster Recovery Rights that I mentioned before.
'For each Instance of eligible server software Customer runs in a Physical OSE or Virtual OSE on a Licensed Server, it may temporarily run a backup Instance in a Physical OSE or Virtual OSE on... another one of its Servers dedicated to disaster recovery.'
You could probably imagine a situation where you could 'live with' the license reassignment rights with a limited kind of replication (if your two servers were identical, and you were pretty sure that you would just leave your 'backup' server running in the event of a failover even if you repaired the old one - and it would get more complicated if your backup server itself failed) but it'd get needlessly complicated and it would only seem sensible to use the Disaster Recovery Rights as the cheapest and most sensible way to do what you want.