Is Hyper-V Server 2008 working on Intel's Atom platform

Solution 1:

Plenty of people have tried VMWare ESXi on Atom, and have come to the conclusion that it works if you get the right motherboard, but performance is absolutely awful.

I can't see this being different for Hyper-V. You're going to be able to buy a cheap AMD Opteron system with virtualization built-in and fully supported by Hyper-V for as little as an Atom system is going to cost you, I'd recommend going down that route.

Solution 2:

just to let you know that I have just installed Windows 2008 R2 (64 bits) on my newly purchased Intel motherboard (ITX Atom D510MO) and that the HyPer-V feature refuses to install, stating it is not supported by the CPU.

Voila, we now have an answer for sure :-)

Solution 3:

While there's nothing specific in the system requirements for Hyper-V that contraindicates using Atom processors..

The wikipedia article on Atom processors indicates that only Z520, Z530, Z540 and Z550 "Silverthorne" processors support Intel VT.

I think if it was me doing it, I'd be using ubuntu-server as a host, running KVM, then using that for virtualising the linux guests. (but I'm not sure if that would be much better, as you'd end up doing software virtualisation! :( )