I've just made a surprising and unpleasant discovery about Windows Server 2022. Apparently, Microsoft has quietly discontinued their free Hyper-V offering. I'm talking about what was officially called Microsoft Hyper-V Server (free core edition server with only the Hyper-V role available). I could not believe this, but after looking around unfortunately I found the
confirmation directly from a Microsoft PM. Oh well, I guess all good things have to come to an end. I remember when Microsoft first introduced free Hyper-V, I thought to myself how it was a bold move that will help them to become the leading hypervisor by following Veeam's model of giving away capable and feature-rich software. However, with Azure (and particularly IaaS) now being the main focus Microsoft, I can see how helping small businesses to run their infrastructures on-prem in a cost-efficient manner is rather counter-productive for them.
Of course, this is big news for alternative free hypervisors, because it leaves a HUGE gap on the market. Needless to say, it makes me very happy that we started working on RHV hypervisor support last year and are getting close to shipping a public beta by now. While we chose Red Hat version of KVM to start with because it is much easier for us to work with a commercial company on such integration projects, of course we can look at expanding our support to other KVM incarnations later. While there's no rush for free Hyper-V users to migrate any time soon as Microsoft will continue to support Hyper-V 2019 until 2029, eventually there will be tens of thousands of environments in need of making the switch. And you'd be surprised how popular Hyper-V is among small businesses in some markets, for example in Germany we have more Community Edition installs protecting Microsoft Hyper-V than VMware vSphere!
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