Deployments of Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 are set to sky rocket following the launch of Hyper-V 2008 R2, which we expect will be announced by Microsoft next week. Last month the Redmond software giant delivered a prelease version of Hyper-V 2008 R2 to third party developers for testing, which suggests the software is nearly ready for customers. Although we’ve had no confirmation from Microsoft, we think the firm will announce the launch date for the product next week and begin shipping it to customers later this spring.

Live Migration enables a VM to be moved from one host server to another without any downtime. VMware has had a similar feature, called VMotion, in its vCenter Server high-end management suite for some time. Likewise, Xen began shipping a live migration feature for its hypervisor in August 2006.

A source who was working at Xen at the time said, “I found selling a hypervisor that didn’t have live migration was extremely hard work. The day we launched live migration our sales shot up by around 20 fold.”

Clearly the availability of live migration for Hyper-V would make the platform far more attractive to customers, which in turn would put additional pressure on competitors such as VMware.