But did any of you guys up there in planning spend just one minute with a smaller shop using it?

The usability in regards to moving machines, in regards to do simple things like backup / restore of individual machines is absolutly non-existent. Brutally speaking Hyper-V is stone age compared with what we had in Virtual Server 2005 at that time. Absolute stone age with no enlightment on the horizon.

I have to regularly move VM's between machines, and regularly an export just takes a LOT longer than "detach and reattach". I sometimes have to move machines off a server that is not usable anymore. I would love to make individual backups and restores, simply because sometime that is what is needed.

And I would love all that without paying again for a management product. Virtual MAchine Manager is nice - but it seriously is overhead too much (cost and hardware wise) for a running little lab of 3-4 small servers.

You guys totally give up on the developer here? Or the small shop? Export? Nice try - sadly export means sometimes copying amultiple hard discs over the network, while in theory they could jsut stay in place.

In Virtual Server i just detached a machine and could do with it what ever I wanted. Backup, restore on another server, everything.

In Hyper-V things are terrific. Heck, the system is too stupid to find another virtual network (albeit same name) because everything seems to go ONLY by GUID.

Looks like someone has to do some seirious work to add some managability to that.