It took a long time but there you have it.

Microsoft is finally officially releasing Hyper-V today after its beta was put through its paces by 1.5 million downloaders. The company's hypervisor will be baked into some versions of Windows Server but you can download the RTM (release-to-manufacturing) at around noon Pacific.

Server 2008 Hyper-V can handle VMs with "up to four virtual cores, 32-bit as well as 64-bit operating systems, and up to 64 GB of RAM." And to prove that their stab at virtualization is more than a neat toy for geeks, Microsoft is undergoing some server consolidation of its own and running some beefy workloads on it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft itself has been using Hyper-V in production environments, including heavy-traffic Web properties such as MSDN, TechNet and Microsoft.com. MSDN has more than 3 million average page views per day, TechNet averages more than 1 million per day, and Microsoft.com averages more than 38 million per day. By the end of June, Microsoft.com is targeted to be 50 percent virtualized with Hyper-V.

If you're of the sort that's starting to feel the way the winds are blowing, here's Microsoft's TechNet page devoted to Hyper-V.

John Howard, Senior Program Manager, Hyper-V team, Windows Core Operating System Division, has a good post on his blog explaining some specification, changes since RC1 and recommended updates.

For example, here are Hyper-V's uppermost limits (parent partition):

• Up to 1 TB of physical memory (Enterprise and Datacenter Editions)
• Up to 32GB of physical memory (Standard Edition)
• Up to 16 logical processors
• Up to 128 virtual machines running at any one time
• Up to 512 virtual machines configured

Be sure to get caught up on some of those knowledge base articles before venturing forth. And don't miss this earlier post on virtual network use cases. Things just got a little more interesting, haven't they?

Should VMware be trembling in their boots?

Maybe just a little. But for now, they are comfortably perched at the very top of the virtualization market. More importantly, the brand has become synonymous with virtualization. And though Hyper-V supports virtualized instances of other operating systems, non-Windows shops will likely be hesitant to make the leap.

In any case, welcome Hyper-V!