On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will soon be running a limited-period offer for the users of VMware server virtualization to switch over to using Microsoft Hyper-V.

The announcement of the new limited-time promotion by Microsoft comes against the backdrop of the imminent launch of Windows Server 2016, which is scheduled for release sometime in September with new per-core licensing.

Announcing the new limited-period offer for VMware users to switch to Hyper-V, Microsoft said that the offer will be available from September 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. The deal is for organizations which are currently running workloads using VMware vSphere server virtualization.

According to the announcement made by Microsoft, if the organizations using VMware vSphere server virtualization switch over to Microsoft's Hyper-V technologies during the limited-period promotion, they will get "free Windows Server Datacenter licenses when buying Windows Server Datacenter + Software Assurance."

Though the exact details of the offer for VMware server virtualization users to switch over to Microsoft Hyper-V are not yet clear, organizations who want to benefit from the deal are being directed to a downloadable "View migration offer" document on Microsoft's switch page. The document asks organizations to "identify virtualized workloads to migrate and specify the Windows Server Datacenter cores required."