Virtual Server 2005, Virtual PC Updated
Two updates are available for Microsoft virtualization products:
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (you gotta love Microsoft's elegant naming scheme, don't ya?), and
Virtual PC 2007, which has released Service Pack 1.
The main reason for the releases appear to be adding support for more OSes. They both support three Windows Vista versions -- Ultimate, Business and Enterprise -- and Windows XP with the just-released (and headache-inducing) Service Pack 3. They also both now support Windows Server 2008 Standard, but Virtual Server goes much beyond with its server OS support, adding support for WS 2008 Core,
WS 2008 Datacenter, WS 2008 Enterprise and WS 2008 Small Business Server.
The announcements, while not a surprise, were also barely a blip on Microsoft's radar. Microsoft's Virtual PC blogger, Ben Armstrong, released the information; as of Friday morning, it wasn't even on the Virtualization Team Blog. That may not have any significance, but it may also be an indicator of how quickly Hyper-V has eclipsed Virtual Server on Microsoft's virtualization totem pole.
Although Virtual Server 2005 is in limited use, it still does have a user base. It's good that Microsoft isn't forgetting them completely, but if I were a heavy Virtual Server user, I'd be wondering how much longer my infrastructure's going to be supported. If you're in that category, it would be wise to be making plans to your switch to Hyper-V now (assuming you want to stick with Redmond solutions.) That, of course, means planning how quickly to decommission all your 32-bit servers, as Hyper-V only runs on x64 boxes.
Posted by Keith Ward on 05/16/2008 at 12:48 PM