I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see more and more details emerge about Windows 8 as Microsoft is preparing for its annual BUILD conference next week. The more I hear about the next release, the more excited I get about the future of Windows Server, Hyper-V and the System Center stack.

The Win 8 Engineering team put together a fantastic blog post about some of the new features of Hyper-V and I wanted to call out a couple:

•  Create VMs with 32 vCPU and 512GB of RAM.  I’m glad we’re making some headway in scalability.  A lot of people are holding off on virtualizing their Tier 1 apps because of 4 vCPU limit.  Granted, don’t take that to mean that performance is going to scale linearly as you add more vCPUs, but now we’ll have the ability to test out larger and larger workloads.  RAM is the hot button issue now, especially with VMware’s vRAM limitations. This is probably the single biggest issue that I have with vSphere. I think it’s a great product, but paying more then more you use is asinine.
• Live Storage Move. That’s a bit of an awkward name, but the concept is sound. Having the ability to move a running VM from one storage location to another with no interruption is cool, but I don’t see a tremendous demand for it in my space (small-medium business).  The majority of the customers I interact with have 1, maybe two SANs and rarely, if ever, have the need to move VMs from location to location. I suppose this is great for larger customers that need this flexibility every now and then, but not on a day-to-day basis.
• Support for Wireless networks. Ok, this is a cool one for those of us out in the field and interacting with customers or partners. Creating a second boot partition and installing Win Server 2008 R2 worked fine, except I couldn’t get it to connect to a wireless network without jumping through some hoops. For everyone out there running Hyper-V in production, remember, just because it supports wireless networks, doesn’t mean you should USE wireless networks.

Add all of this, together with Hyper-V Replica and you can see just how much work Microsoft has put into the next version of Windows and Hyper-V.

What else do you all see?  Anything interesting from the video?

Don’t forget, we’ll see more next week at BUILD!