Microsoft Hyper-V is included as a standard feature of the 64-bit version Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and DataCenter editions. In addition, Hyper-V is available in both the full and core varients of these platforms. Hyper-V is not, however, installed and activated by default. The objective of this chapter, therefore, is to provide an overview of the steps involved in installing the Hyper-V role on a Windows Server 2008 system.

The remainder of this chapter assumes that a 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 is installed and running on a system with appropriate hardware to support hypervisor based virtualization. Detailed information on these requirements are outlined in the chapter entitled Hyper-V System Requirements.