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
"but it is not a charity in the sense that it can continue to devote employee time to a free product that literally generates no revenue for them. It has done this for a long time, and we've liked it, but I can't help but wonder what the opportunity cost was. What else might they have done with those person-hours had they been shifted elsewhere?"
Hyper-V Server was basically Windows Server core with only the Hyper-V role available. As such, the development effort required, over and above that which would be required anyway for the paid products, will not have been significant in the scale of this sort of work.
It was basically a loss-leader as it encouraged people building datacentres to use Hyper-V, even if the workloads were a mix of Linux and Windows - they could use Hyper-V Server for hosting the Linux VMs. It was also useful for testing. All of this is likely to have led to further purchase of the paid versions. Without it, other hypervisors may have looked more attractive.
Microsoft appears to have withdrawn it in an effort to drive subscription revenue to Azure / Azure Stack HCI. I don't know to what extent that's working, but anecdotally I've been told by a number of consultants that they've done POCs for customers interesdted in Azure Stack HCI, but most haven't led to actual orders as they decide it's too expensive for what it offers.
A fair bit of the market may therefore have moved to VMWare, Proxmox, etc, and this may well have had a knock-on effect on sales of paid licenses. No doubt Microsoft will be monitoring this, but their main aim these days seems to be to push everyone into hosted subscription services of one type or another.
without forgetting that the real problem we were pointing out was not the price, but the exhibition space; hyperv server had no unnecessary services, unlike windows servers.
Paying a hundred euros for hyperv server for the license is acceptable.
Low resource usage,
Low penetration surface,
No cloud...
All that we want...
Not to mention that there were no dedicated devs, since we had to ping them here to tell them that there was an update error that had been going on for 3 months...
Support until 2024? my eye...
They already forgot that hyperv server existed xD
- I don't know precise details, but one of our customers (small margin-operating factory floor) has one single expensive beefy server, running Hyper-V Server 2019, onto which they migrate workload VMs for whose they need immediate compute capacity (or network throughput), and then later migrate them off to more efficient HW. Those VMs are running various versions of Windows Server, older, newer, some even Client OSs.
I'm told that having Hyper-V Server on that machine saves them tons of money on licenses, and headache figuring out how to have that legally. The alternative is having properly licensed Datacenter Server, and upgrading all the workload VMs to be EULA compliant. Karl-WE
1 only runs linux (and a freebsd)
1 other linux and a win11the others, mainly windows server
SpenceFoxtrot with yours and other similar comments on licensing:
Could you please outline what is running on Windows Server Hyper-V SKU. Only Linux VMs?
Microsoft appears to have withdrawn it in an effort to drive subscription revenue to Azure / Azure Stack HCI.
