Microsoft’s virtualization technology is officially available; people can now download Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 on Microsoft’s Web site . The technology allows people to run multiple OS — including Linux — using one physical hardware running Windows Server, and is available slightly ahead of the latest schedule Microsoft had for the software. Hyper-V was expected to be available 180 days, or about six months, after that release, which would have meant by the end of August. Virtualization is becoming a key way companies are driving costs out of the datacenter by running OSes in virtual machines rather than physically on servers. Microsoft aims to catch up to virtualization leader VMware in providing this technology for hardware systems not only running on Windows, but also Linux and other OSes. Additionally, Hyper-V has a new virtual service provider/virtual service client architecture that allows hardware to access and utilize core resources more effectively and also is optimized to migrate VMs from one physical host to another with minimal downtime, Microsoft said.