Hyper-V 2008 R2 can be ran as bare metal or hosted hypervisor. the bare metal hypervisor is free and can be downloaded from the following link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd776191 and the hosted hypervisor requires a Windows 2008 license. both hypervisors use Windows 2008 OS, the difference is that in Hyper-V bare metal Windows 2008 is customized to only run Hyper-V in server code mode, and the hosted edition is the full blown windows 2008 server on which the host server and VMs in it can be used for anything.
I chose to run Hyper-V as bare metal on my testing server hardware at home because I plan to setup a mini-enterprise network including exchange 2010 for testing. I guess of what method of setup is better can be disputed but somehow I feel more comfortable running a dedicated host for my VMs, than having a server that is a host, and a server in itself.
Installing Hyper-V is not much difference than installing Windows 2008 Server, like I said, they are the same, just packaged to serve a different purpose. in the following posts I will go through some Hyper-V setup guides. Hyper-V is still new to me, I’ve been using VMware ESX for more than 3 years, but we are planning to migrate to Hyper-V this year, so the purpose of this testing is to get acquainted with it.
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