Microsoft's Hyper-V has an Achilles heel.

"In a nutshell, one of Hyper-V's advertised strengths -- the host partition's ability to work with generic Windows device drivers -- is also its greatest weakness," Kennedy explains in this Enterprise Desktop post.

Kennedy, you see, found that out that the hard way while experimenting with the release candidate, in which he made the mistake of trying to install the latest ATI Catalyst (8.4) software for the system's X1300 display adapter, a move that yielded a Blue Screen of Death both alarming and puzzling.

More troublesome is the fact that Microsoft advertises Hyper-V's ability to leverage existing Windows drivers is a competitive advantage over VMware's black-box approach to ESX.

But Kennedy explains that, "it effectively places Hyper-V -- and the rest of Microsoft's virtualization architecture, for that matter -- at the mercy of the single most glaring weakness of the Windows ecosystem: third-party device driver developers, most of whom have no idea what Hyper-V is or how to avoid tripping over it during driver configuration/installation."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 13, 2008 07:02 AM