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(20th Apr 2005) Exciting news for those people who are interested in Microsoft's Virtualisation solution.

Steve Ballmer announced several initiatives today at the Microsoft Management Summit connected to Microsoft's Virtualisation technologies.

Several of these are quite exciting and in my opinion show that Microsoft do listen to us customers, at least sometimes!

The high points for me are:

1. Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 beta is available today and adds supports for 64 bit computing, enabling a 64-bit edition of Windows 2003 server to act as a host for virtual machines. Hopefully VS2005 SP1 will be out before the end of the year. And also this bodes well for Virtual PC 64-bit support into the future too.
2. "Improved support for third-party guest operating systems" on VS 2005 SP1. No, I don't have details yet... but it sounds promising!
3. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 support for VS2005, with an admin pack to allow monitoring and managing of Virtual Server via MOM 2005.
4. And saving the best to last, Microsoft intend to provide royaly-free licences to developers for the VHD virtual disk format. This should be very exciting to all those people who want to do more with virtual disks as it should make it possible for all kinds of deployment and editing utilities to pop up in the future.

More generally, Microsoft also confirmed:

• Support for virtualisation in Longhorn - yeah like we didn't all see that coming the day MS purchased Connectix.
• Future support of the Intel and AMD hardware/processor based virtualisation initatives, which again is obvious, but confirms the future of the MS 'virtualisation platform'.
• That support for running under virtualisation will continue to improve in other product families.

That should whet our appetites for the future!

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