Microsoft announced today that their Windows Server 2008 hypervisor "Hyper-V" has gone to release candidate status and will be freely available online to customers and partners sometime this morning on the Hyper-V website.

Hyper-V seems to be getting a little bit more fanfare out of the Microsoft marketing machine than is usually the case for such software components (for instance, neither Virtual PC nor Virtual Server, the company's previous offerings on this front, got quite this much hype) and it seems clear that the reason is VMware's continued success on the enterprise front. This quote from a beta tester in the press release, seems cherry-picked to signal as much: ""Hyper-V is a thinner, more optimized virtualization technology than we've seen from other vendors...." Hmm... what other vendors were those, do you suppose?