Q: I heard the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is over 3GB in size—is this true?

A. Yes and no. People often confuse the hypervisor with the management partition that’s running Windows Server 2008 R2 (normally server core), which uses around 3-4GB of disk space.

However, the actual hypervisor uses only around 1MB of disk space and is very secure and locked down since it doesn’t contain any third-party drivers or code.

The management partition contains other drivers and third-party code that’s secured using standard Windows Server capabilities which are among the best in the industry.

It’s important to realize that the capabilities of the Hyper-V virtualization platform require both the hypervisor and the management partition, so just looking at the size of the code isn’t really what matters. What is critical is the functionality provided, how it’s managed, and its security.

The disk and memory footprint are basically negligible when you look at the total workload running on a Hyper-V server.