Microsoft announced Thursday it has released the first beta of its Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor, previously codenamed "Viridian." It wasn't expected until early next year. The first beta release runs on the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Microsoft released pre-beta code in the form of a community technology preview, or CTP, for what's now known as Hyper-V in September.

Each VM can also support up to four virtual SCSI drives and 64GB of memory per VM, according to company statements. Additionally, beta integration components are available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 x86 and x64 Edition.