Over the weekend, Microsoft finally began rolling out Hyper-V Server 2019 after months of mysterious delays.

“Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019 is now available in the Evaluation Center,” a note appended to a November 2018 post to Microsoft’s official Windows Server blog briefly explains. “All previous issues related to the evaluation media have been resolved.”

To give you an idea of how long this has taken, Microsoft initially made Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server Version 1809 available to customers on October 2, 2018. Hyper-V Server is, of course, based on the same code base, and it is normally released alongside its more traditional Windows Server siblings.

But that didn’t happen this time. As it turns out, these latest Windows Server versions all suffered from some of the same issues that plagued Windows 10 version 1809. So Microsoft pulled the products “isolated reports” of problems. But when Microsoft fixed the issues and finally made an evaluation media version of Windows Server 2019 available from its Evaluation Center in January, the firm, again, said nothing about Hyper-V Server 2019.

For those unfamiliar, Hyper-V Server is a free enterprise-class server virtualization solution that separates out Windows Server’s Hyper-V functionality into a bare metal, standalone product. “Hyper-V Server 2019 provides new and enhanced features that can help you deliver the scale and performance needs of your mission-critical workloads,” Microsoft explains of the latest version.

So, what’s with the delay?

As Mary Jo Foley, who’s been closely tracking this release for several months, reports, Microsoft found some issues in the installation media for Hyper-V Server 2019 and was “actively working on resolving it.” She’s been asking about the release since last year and has only gotten “coming soon” responses each time.

Anyway, it’s finally here. And if you’re looking at grabbing Hyper-V Server 2019, which is free, you can now do so via the Microsoft Evaluation Center.

Tagged with Hyper-V Server 2019, Windows Server 2019