The book does provide rich information and step-by-step guide on setting up Hyper-V host, guest and VMM. However, there're too many screen-shot but too little architectural diagram/description. Compared to Mastering VMWare Infrastructure 3 by Chris McCain as a competitive counterpart, this one is no match.

I was probably the first one on Amazon to get this book as I've been waiting for it for the past month. Exactly what I was looking for! The book helped me get HyperV going and I was also pleasantly surprised to see coverage of the new Virtual Machine Manager 2008, something I downloaded and played with. VMM2008 is a great companion to HyperV! I highly recommend this book, extremely helpful!

another keeper from unleashed author morimoto. i have all of rands books, they are the best real world planning and installation guides around. i wasnt aware of the solution accelerator capacity planning tool that was available. that chapter really helped me properly size my host servers to scale to the capacity i need for my datacenter. two thumbs up

As the cost of data centres continues to rise, companies are searching for ways to more efficiently use their machines. Here Microsoft offers its take, with the book describing how under its MS Windows Server 2008, you can use the Hyper-V virtualisation. The product is not really targeted at the individual home user. You can see this in the second chapter, which is devoted to a high level discussion of the business rationale for a corporate installation of Hyper-V. Indeed, you should read this closely, for it explains in a top down manner why migration could make sense for your company.

The rest of the book describes the actual installation and management of Hyper-V. Dealing with gritty and inevitable issues like keeping up with installing service packs and updates. Yes, there will be improvements and bug fixes to this product. Here, Microsoft has built in extensive capabilities for easy maintenance.

Now what choices are available for the guest operating systems? Naturally, Microsoft offers its own OSs here. The text goes into some detail about how to install these. No surprise to you, I hope. But commendably, the book also explains how to install a linux based OS under Hyper-V. Reassuring to some sysadmins.

A discerning reader might be a little queasy about the prospect of bugs in Hyper-V. Given that it functions as a "root" operating system (so to speak), a bug in it could be worse than a bug in a child guest operating system that you install inside Hyper-V. But with any virtualisation product, this is the reality that you have to deal with. In this wise, Hyper-V is not at any particular disadvantage vis-a-vis competing products.