Hyper-V provides software infrastructure and basic management tools that you can use to create and manage a virtualized server computing environment. This virtualized environment can be used to address a variety of business goals aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs. For example, a virtualized server environment can help you:
- Reduce the costs of operating and maintaining
physical servers by increasing your hardware utilization. You can
reduce the amount of hardware needed to run your server
workloads.
- Increase development and test efficiency by
reducing the amount of time it takes to set up hardware and
software and reproduce test environments.
- Improve server availability without using as
many physical computers as you would need in a failover
configuration that uses only physical computers.
For more information about Hyper-V, see the Windows Server 2008 Technical Library (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93752). For information about the new features in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V technology, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142885.