Hyper-V
Microsoft's type-1 hypervisor, included in Windows Server — the basis of hyperconverged clusters and of virtualisation on Azure Local.
Hyper-V in practice
Hyper-V is Microsoft's type-1 hypervisor: it runs directly on the hardware rather than inside a host operating system, and ships as a server role in both the Standard and the Datacenter edition of Windows Server — no separate hypervisor licence is required, though guest operating systems still need licensing. On Windows Server 2025 a generation 2 VM takes up to 240 TB of memory and 2,048 virtual processors; a host handles up to 4 PB of memory (with 5-level paging) and 1,024 running VMs, and a failover cluster scales to 64 nodes and 8,000 VMs.
Generation 2 VMs provide UEFI, Secure Boot and a virtual TPM, so BitLocker works inside the guest. Hyper-V Replica replicates asynchronously to a second site, at intervals of 30 seconds, 5 minutes or 15 minutes. In the hyperconverged form factor, Hyper-V shares its nodes with Storage Spaces Direct — the same architecture Alendris designs for on-premises clusters and the one underpinning Azure Local.