What is this???
It's on my top 3 worst articles for 2008.

You can see from the title of his book that he has an agenda

Agenda or no agenda he brings up a good list of questions. These are really questions you should ask any virtualization vendor. Yes, it's a strange "article" but a valid one none-the-less.

I guess if I had a VMware consulting business I would ask the same easy questions that have been answered in blog after blog and presentations on Hyper V. This person just proves the the fact that we need more people that understand what a HyperVisor is then folks that are are run of the mill just hoped on the virtualization bandwagon folks. Do your own technical research how do you know that xen dom 0 is a vm go do the research and stop with the is it really nonsense.

Did you even look into the answers to these questions? There is a ton of material on the architecture of Hyper-V, how it works, and how it relates to the parent partition in terms of security and providing other functionality. I understand this coming from random bloggers, but I'd expect the level on CIO.com to be much higher. This reads like VMware "scare-points" than a real discussion of virtualization issues.

Those "valid points" are called into serious question by his clear dislike for Windows and (by association) Microsoft as well?

Many of the "answers" he bemoans are readily available if he actually cared to seek them out.

Basically, "agenda" comes through loud and clear. ..either that, or "you need a posting this morning and it better be VMWare-favorable!"

How about doing some due diligence before making your CIO.com look like a bunch of hacks for VMware. The answers to all of these questions is on the Microsoft.com Web site. There's this really cool thing called Google that can help you get the answers to the questions you raise. Try it out, it works a treat.

FUD. Pure FUD.

What is the motivation for someone who is a VMware evangelist to ask these questions of hyper-V ? Edward for your education ...

So why does Hyper-V depend on Windows 2008 Server security?
For Hyper-VMs Windows Provides a pre-existing file system, and a security model for determining which users can manage VM.

What zero-day attacks will cause heart-ache for all adopters? Can they be prevented?We're trying to imagine classes of problem here. One of Hyper-Vs advantages to a business is that it can be managed like any other Windows service, against that is the risk that a exploit which exposes Windows services in general exposes hyper-v. Server-2008 especially core reduces the attack surface of a Hyper-V server by installing only those components that are needed.

And which boots first? If it is Hyper-V, then 2008 should run within a VM, but does it? If Windows 2008 Server crashes or is forced to crash by something malicious, will all the VMs running upon it also come tumbling down?
Windows runs in a partition. Under hyper-V not partitions are equal. The first one - the parent partition - manages the others and provides drivers. Some "crashes" of the parent will not affect the children. A bad Kernel mode driver will take out the whole system - but those are the same drivers that are in the hypervisor with VMware, so the risk to both designs is the same.
Does 2008 act as a management appliance, or is it something more that is essential to the running of Hyper-V? Can it run without it?
Services in 2008 provide support for emulated hardware and provide the underlying file system etc. It's from 2008 that hyper-v gets instructions about what VMs to start. So it can't run without it.
any VM on the bridge can be seen by any other VM. How many bridges is it possible to create?
No limit that I know of. Since only one switch can be bound to a NIC the limit is more likely to be physical NICs in the machine.
Since it is a bridge, and Windows 2008 Server plays a role in bridging, can Windows Server 2008 see every packet as it goes across the bridge?
There are perf counters available from the switch to tell which VMs are creating the traffic, I'm not sure if you can sniff the packets by connecting to the switch, but you should be able to do so by installing the right network monitor driver on the physical NIC card. In its normal state, no 2008 app can get to a VMs network traffic.
You should definitely put one before your Server 2008 instance to protect it from attack. But if Server 2008 participates in all the bridging, how can you protect it from the VMs?
The bridge is only optionally connected to any network stack which terminates inside the OS.
From a storage perspective, can disks that store VMs be encrypted, and can Hyper-V work with these?
Yes. 2008 has bitlocker as standard. It's just storage as far as hyper-v is concerned.
Can VMs be placed on USB storage? What happens when the storage is taken away when a VM is running?
Yes they can. Same thing happens as if you remove any other kind of storage (including unplugging the disk on a physical machine)
How do you handle forensics of a Hyper-V VM? Can they be killed as if you were pulling the plug? Is this hampered by the lack of any ability to migrate live VMs?
Yes there is a power-off button.
You can make a snapshot of a VM which preserves its memory state and disk state, and a shadow copy can be made of a running disk with the standard windows tools. This can be copied for analysis.

Thanks for a completely useless article. It is clear from your itemized list you have an agenda to sell more copies of your worthless book and consulting services. Thanks for wasting 2 minutes of my life. Douche.