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
Move on and prove them wrong. We already are across our entire install base. We're moving to XCP-NG. The discussion is over, it's happening. It is a bad move in many opinions but we don't make the decisions.
Move on
I know there is the surface attack increasing with webbrowser management (I hate that).
But, functionnality, what is lost (from hyperv) ?
SpenceFoxtrot We looked into XCP-NG and Proxmox to replace our Hyper-V Server usage, and found the following two missing features at this point in time:
- Support for more recent products / features e.g. Docker, WSL 2, Microsoft Connected Cache / EFLOW (the new WSUS https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/do/waas-microsoft-connected-cache, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/azure-iot-edge-for-linux-on-windows), and Virtualization-based security (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/device-guard/enable-virtualization-based-protection-of-code-integrity) all of which require Nested Virtualization support. We found that support for this is patchy at best in XCP-NG and Proxmox https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/4643/nested-virtualization-of-windows-hyper-v-on-xcp-ng https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/nested-virtualization-gpu-passthrough-causes-vm-crashes-bluescreens.119564/ and currently has issues like only supporting AMD or Intel CPUs which are ‘very recent’ properly, blue screens and performance issues. We didn't see evidence that resolving these issues was easy or considered a priority by the community, and since Docker is definitely the future for any server apps, this seemed pretty worrying.
- Full support for full disk encryption (i.e. BitLocker) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/information-protection/bitlocker/bitlocker-overview which is included in Hyper-V Server but an outstanding issue for both XCP-NG https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/463 and Proxmox
If you don't care about future-proofing support for nested virtualisation / Docker and/or encryption, you may find that XCP-NG/Proxmox are perfect for your needs.
