When I saw the news about the upcoming Windows Vista SP2, there was a little note right down at the bottom that got me quite excited.
"Windows Vista SP2 includes Hyper-V™ technology, enabling full virtualization of server workloads"
I know a lot of people that run Windows Server 2008 on their laptops, specifically so that they can run Hyper-V virtual machines rather than using the much inferior Virtual PC 2007 - so this looked like exciting news. This point was carried on through as news about the Service Pack Beta spread (see Mary-Jo Foley, Gizmodo) among others.
Microsoft have since clarified the position. SP2 does not add Hyper-V capabilities to Windows Vista SP2. The confusion all comes from the fact that the SP2 is actually a service pack to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 - which goes to show how similar the two code bases are now. There is a good explanation over at Springboard.
I wanted to post this here because I'd seen the announcement from Microsoft and mis-understood exactly what SP2 was providing and I know of others that were equally confused. Luckily Microsoft virtualization guru Brian Randell corrected my understanding - but not everyone is lucky enough to have a Brian Randell in their pocket so I thought I would share the clarification :-)
It is also very interesting to see how excited people were when they thought that Hyper-V was coming to Vista - I hope once the fuss of the confusing press release has settled down, Microsoft take note.
