Utility hosting services provider Layered Technologies announced on Wednesday that it has collaborated with Microsoft to become what it calls the “first hosting provider to launch Hyper-V product.”

The announcement was made Wednesday at the second annual LT PACT 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, which will close with a keynote address by Tier 1 Research founder Andy Schroepfer.

Launched in a beta release last December, Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based vitualization platform that is a vital feature of Windows Server 2008. In March, Microsoft updated Hyper-V with a feature-complete release that offers “updated, near-final code.”

The technology enables the virtualization of multiple operating systems all on the same server, offering a scalable and highly available platform.

“We are excited to be a part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide customers and partners with the best operating system platform for virtualization,” says Jack Finlayson, CEO of Layered Technologies. “We worked closely with Microsoft to be the first hosting providers to rapidly deploy this technology. In bringing virtualization to the market, we are looking to help businesses consolidate resources, reduce support costs, and decrease operations expenses.”

Layered Technologies will provide Microsoft Hyper-V GoLive Beta Program and Microsoft Developer Network members with dedicated servers in an on-demand, hosted environment.

As a member of the MSDN community or a GoLive Partner, customers will receive an exclusive monthly discount on the Microsoft Hyper-V-enabled hosting plans.

Layered Technology will also offer managed services on the Hyper-V product once it is officially released out of beta, which is currently set for September.

This dedicated management services offering, entitled DEFCON Managed Services, will include around the clock monitoring, technical support, security updates and expert system administration of virtualization server engineers.

The company recently brought over the DEFCON Managed Services from Fastservers to a select group of current customers, following Layered Technologies’ April acquisition of Fastservers.

Layered Technologies says it also plans to offer Hyper-V-based virtual private servers within the next couple weeks.