Microsoft just announced that they are including Hyper-V with the next versio n of Windows. This now makes the third (in our opinion) most interesting new feature to be included with Windows 8. We have briefly talked about the other two (USB optimizations and the new File Management system). This new feature, however, is something that could have a big impact... on VMware. You see right nowVMware is one of the leading companies in virtualiation and their products are in use by a large number of people (incuding us). Of course Microsoft tried to include a type of Hyper-V in Winows 7 (XP-Mode) but that did not go over so well. This time things are a little different.

The Hyper-V that will be included with Widows 8 includes a llittle more than the XP Mode that is on the current flavor of Windows. For starters you wll not be able to run this unless you have a 64-bit CPU and at least 4GB of RAM. On top of all that you will need to have a CPU that supports Second Level Address Translation. Now this is not a networking term but relates to memory addressing and is a feature that has only popped up in the last few generations of CPUs from Intel and AMD. I wonder, if there is any chance that Microsoft will enable this feature for the ARM archiceture and allow a sort of "dual boot" mode with the guest OS taking the lead in system resources and the Host becoming a background task just to keep the Guest operational. In all honesty I am just waiting to see what tablet manufacturers are going to offer Windows 8 drivers for existing ARM tablets. I will be very interesting to see things a they unfold leading up to November of 2012.

Source Windows 8 Blog

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