Microsoft announced major upgrades to Hyper-V to make it competitive with VMware at TechEd 2012, June 11-14 in Orlando, writes Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe in his latest Alert, “Virtualization, Cloud and Mobility are in Abundance at TechEd 2012”.  In the first of what he promises will be a series of alerts looking at Microsoft’s major initiatives in cloud and mobile, Lowe presents a list of the major Hyper-V announcements including:

• Concurrent workload migrations,
• Scalability to 64 notes and 4,000 VMs,
• Anti-affinity VM rules,
• Live Migration,
• Cluster Aware Updating,
• Windows NIC teaming,
• Hyper-V Extensible switch,
• Shared nothing live migration,
• Hyper-V replica.

And, he says, this is not all. He promises to publish a full list of Hyper-V improvements soon.

Some of these duplicate or otherwise directly target VMware. And unlike that most popular hypervisor, Hyper-V is free.

He also reports that Microsoft emphasized Azure, Office 365 and a new version of InTune, “PC management and security in the cloud” at TechEd. And mobility and Microsoft’s innovative Metro mobile computing user interface “were everywhere” at the show.

Overall the strong message is that Microsoft is moving aggressively into the new world of mobile/cloud computing both on the private and public cloud and on multiple levels in the stack. And it obviously understands the strong connection between cloud and mobile end-user devices.

He concludes that CIOs should not discount Microsoft in the new cloud/mobile computing environment and should pay serious attention to the barrage of announcements from TechEd that make Microsoft products more competitive. Obviously Microsoft intends to move aggressively to carve out a space in the new virtualized/cloud/mobile IT of the 21st Century.