Surgient, the leading provider of virtual lab management software used to automate and accelerate the application lifecycle, today announced that its Surgient Lab Management Platform will support Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization software available with Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V is expected to ship by August 2008. With today's Microsoft news regarding its feature-complete release candidate of the Hyper-V hypervisor, Surgient becomes one of the first companies to announce a product roadmap that includes Hyper-V, demonstrating its continued commitment to delivering heterogeneous lab solutions that can manage the very latest virtualization offerings.

As part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V creates virtual server environments and provides basic management tools for a virtual infrastructure. Given the competitive nature of the virtual server market, with other offerings from VMware and Citrix, companies are looking to software vendors to manage these virtual machines and avoid virtual machine sprawl.

"With this current release, it's clear that Hyper-V includes novel virtualization functionality, and that enterprises will no doubt soon deploy more applications on hypervisors from different vendors," said Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy at Surgient. "Our customers are interested in virtual lab management solutions that can handle multiple hypervisors in blended lab configurations, as some are considering applications that will rely on Hyper-V. As a long time Microsoft virtualization collaborator, we are excited to add Hyper-V support in the Fall, soon after its expected release to manufacturing, to accommodate the application development process for early users of the new hypervisor."

"Surgient's support reinforces the customer demand for Microsoft virtualization technologies, including Hyper-V, and that they'll continue to play a large role in lab environments," said Mike Schutz, director of product management for Windows Server Virtualization at Microsoft. "Tools like Surgient lab management help to orchestrate the use of virtualization in the application development lifecycle and Microsoft is pleased to continue our ongoing work with Surgient related to virtualization strategy and solutions."

Hyper-V support is the latest example of how Surgient is providing the industry's most flexible virtual lab management solution that accelerates the application lifecycle for many of the world's largest companies. Heterogeneous virtualization management products, like Surgient's solutions, are necessary as more companies increase their overall use of virtualization and gravitate to the hypervisors with functionality best suited for their needs. With this approach, Surgient best assists IT operations as they rapidly build, deploy and tear-down complex software environments.