Microsoft confirmed Tuesday that its Hyper-V server virtualization technology is likely to ship up to a couple months ahead of the previously projected date.

The company has said all along that Hyper-V, which is currently in beta, would ship within 180 days of the release of Windows Server 2008.

The server officially launched at the end of February, and the company had tagged August as the likely ship timeframe, a full use of the 180 days.

"We are feeling pretty good that it won't be up to the full 180 days," said Dai Vu, director of virtualization products and solutions in Microsoft's server and tools division.

Last week, Larry Orecklin, general manager of the Windows enterprise and management division, said during a meeting with Network World editors that Hyper-V would ship in June or July.

Vu added that Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, which adds support for Hyper-V, would ship 30 to 60 days after Hyper-V hits its release-to-manufacturing stage. VMM 2008 is currently in beta.

When Hyper-V ships Microsoft will be adding a third hypervisor option to go along with those already available from VMware and Xen-based derivatives marketed by Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, and Novell.

Hypervisor technology is a base technology layer that acts as the virtualization foundation for guest operating systems.

Microsoft's Hyper-V will support as guest operating systems Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86) , and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

Experts believe that the hypervisor will eventually become a commodity, although VMware disputes that notion.