Will Hyper-V always be free?

We're a BIG VMWare customer and recently MS were trying very hard to sell us on moving to Hyper-V, on one of their slides they stated that the hypervisor itself would be free for at least 48 months (and this was in late-Oct/early-Nov 2009).

Then again they repeatedly stated that it was better than ESX so what do they know ;)

Looking at the current product set and public roadmap, yes it seems it will remain free. However the tools for advanced functionality and better management (such as some in System Center suite) will be where you pay later.

I think the hypervisor will remain free, based on what it actually does. It has no GUI or real interface beyond powershell and a command prompt, so you can't use it as a desktop or server. You still need a licensed machine to manage it, you need licenses for all the VMs you want to create. That's where the $ is for Microsoft.

ESXi, Xen and Hyper-V all share the same mindset in this ie the hypervisor is free - what you pay for is advanced management and that's what the real evaluation should be focusing on anyway.

Hyper-V Server, the hypervisor-only version of the product, is totally free. Nobody can of course foresee Microsoft's plans for the future, but, at least for now, it doesn't come with any obligation to switch to Windows Server 2008 + Hyper-V.