Microsoft Hyper-V Server

~ the eulogy ~

Microsoft Hyper-V Server shipped on 1 October 2008 and it was free, which in 2008 was the entire argument. VMware charged for ESX. Microsoft did not charge for this. What you downloaded was Windows Server Core with the Hyper-V role turned on and almost nothing else on top of it: no desktop, and no license to run Windows inside the virtual machines it hosted. Configuration happened through a text menu called sconfig.

Six versions shipped over thirteen years, cut from the Windows Server releases they matched. The 2008 R2 release added live migration and support for a terabyte of physical memory, which is the point where the free product stopped being something you only used for testing. After that came 2012, 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019.

Then it stopped, without an announcement that it was stopping. On 16 August 2021 somebody asked on Microsoft's TechCommunity forums whether a 2022 version was coming. On 24 August, Elden Christensen, a principal program manager in the Core OS group, replied that Hyper-V Server 2019 was the last version and that its support would run to January 2029.

I never ran it. Free hypervisors are a shelf a working engineer keeps an eye on without necessarily putting anything on it, and the ones I watched were the ESXi free tier and later Proxmox. What made this one interesting from the outside was the licensing arithmetic underneath, which was less generous than the word free suggested.

~ the dossier ~

~ what free actually bought you ~

The free part was narrower than it sounded, and deliberately so. Hyper-V Server came with no guest licenses whatsoever, so a shop running Windows virtual machines on it paid Microsoft roughly what it would have paid anyway. Windows Server Standard and Datacenter bundled guest rights into the license, which meant the free product was only genuinely cheaper if what you were running on top of it was Linux or something you had already licensed elsewhere.

That put it in two places. Home labs, where nobody was going to buy a Datacenter license to run three virtual machines in a spare tower, and shops with Linux workloads who wanted a hypervisor with a Microsoft support contract behind it. It was also how a lot of people learned Hyper-V at all, because a student could put it on any box that would boot.

~ the announcement was a forum reply ~

The Register went to Microsoft on 31 August 2021 to ask whether a product had just been discontinued in a support forum, and Microsoft did not contest it. Christensen's public line was that Azure Stack HCI is the premier hypervisor offering for running virtual machines on premises, and that it is the strategic direction for the platform.

Azure Stack HCI is a subscription. Ten dollars per physical core per month, billed through an Azure account, on hardware you still buy yourself. The free thing was replaced by a metered thing and nobody wrote that sentence into a press release, because there was no press release.

~ dead and still patched ~

Hyper-V Server 2019 is running in production somewhere right now, which is the odd part of this particular death. Mainstream support ended on 9 January 2024 and extended support runs to 9 January 2029, so the final build of a product Microsoft stopped making in 2021 will still be taking security fixes more than twenty years after the first one shipped. The Hyper-V name did not go anywhere either. The hypervisor is still a role in Windows Server and still a checkbox in Windows 11 Pro. What ended was the version you could download without buying anything first.

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