Ever since Windows 2008 R2 SP1 became available people have been waiting for Windows Hyper-V Server R2 to catch up. The wait is over as last week Microsoft made it available on their website http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd776191.aspx. That’s a nice package to have when it serves your needs and there ‘s little to argue about. Guidance on how to configure it and how to get remote management set up has been out for a while and is quite complete so that barrier shouldn’t stop you from using it where appropriate. If you’re staring out head over to José Barreto’s blog to get a head start and here’s some more information on the subject http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794756(WS.10).aspx and naturally there are some tools around to help out if needed and the Microsoft provided tools are not to you liking http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/. So there you go, now you have a free and very capable hypervisor available to the public that gives you high availability, Live Migration, Dynamic Memory, Remote FX and they even threw in their software iSCSI target 3.3 into the free package so you can build a free iSCSI SAN supported by Microsoft. Live is good.