Tomorrow (09-13) will the event Build kick off. Microsoft will give more details around Windows 8 and personally I can’t wait to read and see more about Windows 8!! My expectations are very high.

In the last few weeks a lot of news around Windows 8 appeared online. So before the Windows 8 hurricane will conquer the internet I will summarize some news around Windows 8 from the last few weeks.

Hyper-V will be on the Windows 8 desktop. A client hypervisor will have much potential from my point of view. Think about the possibilities this will bring to us. Legacy applications can easily run in their own virtual machine and this virtual machine can even be a Linux virtual machine. So this new feature is not only great for IT Pro’s but also for end users who will work with legacy applications and Windows 8.

Even working with a wireless NIC in your desktop/ laptop system is not a problem for the client hypervisor. A virtual machine can make use of a wireless NIC in the host by bridging a connection to the wireless NIC.

For virtual machines that needs a lot of resources there is also some good news. Hyper-V in Windows 8 will support up to 32 virtual CPU’s and 512 GB of RAM.

Beside of LiveMigration Windows 8 will offer Live Storage Migration. With this you could move the virtual machines storage from local storage to other local storage, to a USB stick or to a remote file share while the virtual machine keeps running! And yes, also to a remote file share. So this mean support for NFS storage!

On the blog of Ben Armstrong we can read that Hyper-V in Windows 8 will support hibernation and sleep functionality. This is great news for them who will run the client hypervisor on a laptop.

There also will be native Explorer support for ISO and VHD files in Windows 8. So no need for third party tools to mount ISO files but easily access them just from Windows Explorer. You can mount the ISO from the Explorer and Windows will create a virtual CD/DVD drive.

Working with VHD files will also be simplified. In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 we already have the possibility to boot from VHD. In Windows 8 we can mount a VHD file just like an ISO file. The only difference is that a mounted VHD file will appear as a new hard drive.

You can take a look for some pictures of Windows 8 at the blog of Hyper-v.nu fellow Hans Vredevoort: http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2011/09/showing-hyper-v-in-windows-8-in-pictures/

For now, get some sleep and let’s see what tomorrow will bring us!