VMware has dominated the market of server virtualization, but it is hoped by Microsoft to change its new offering, Hyper-V R2. The update has added some important capabilities which will help Microsoft to close out the functionality gap with VMware and also with some other rivals. But analysts are still seeing this product falling short in some areas required to running the applications of enterprise class.

Gary Chen, who is the research manager for enterprise virtualization software at IDC has said that they have much of the basics covered if you are doing the basic consolidation, but they lack a lot of advanced use case materials like business continuity, virtualization desktop infrastructure and also resource optimization.

Hyper-V R2 is freely shipped with the Windows Server 2008 R2, though in order to take the full advantage of some of the more advanced capabilities customers will be purchasing System Center Virtual Machine Manager for a cost of $869 per physical server.

The new features that are included are Live Migration, which allows the virtual machines to move from one physical server to the other one without interrupting any service. Hyper-V R2 can take the advantage of more powerful servers too, with a support for 64 physical processors, and also it allows the virtual machines to migrate between two servers of same processor family.