Hyper-V: 24 Logical Processors and 192 VMs

Hyper-V got a little bigger (for lack of a better word) this week. You can download an update for Hyper-V that will allow it to support 24 logical processors, as well as raise the maximum number of virtual machines from 128 to 192. Will you need this much Hyper-V power? Probably not, but there is some interesting math that shows how much money you can save when virtualization scales up like this.

Dan Woodman breaks down the numbers on his blog. If you have a physical server running 20 VMs with Hyper-V, you can cut the cost of Windows Server 2008 by nearly 50 percent. At 192 virtual machines, you get down to $62 per Windows Server license.

I just asked our in-office virtualization guru how this plays out for Microsoft. It seems that all of this virtualization is going to cost Microsoft some licensing fees. Of course, there's no guarantee that any Hyper-V user would have bought 20 more physical machines and their licenses. It's likely users are virtualizing more now because they can. And of course, Microsoft stands to potentially gain from the sale of virtualization management tools like System Center as well.