http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/exchange-articles/windows-server-virtualisation-hyper-v,-an-introduction/

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released in the summer of 2008 and is Microsoft first real hypervisor virtualization solution. It is not an emulated environment like Virtual Server or Virtual PC, but as a hypervisor solution it “sits” between the hardware and the Operating System. With the Integration Components installed you can fully use the functionality offered by Hyper-V. You have to secure the Parent Partition as much as possible to prevent compromising the complete system.

In the next articles I will talk more about the Hyper-V best practices, deploying Virtual Machines, using the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 and the “high availability” options and why these aren’t really high available in the current release of Hyper-V.