Microsoft's Virtualisation Beta Released

September 1st, 2006: Microsoft's stab at the highly lucrative virtualisation market gets a little sharper with the release of its latest service pack. Support for AMD processors is included.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 is Microsoft's latest release and is available for download today. The release incorporates support for AMD's chip-based virtualisation.

Beta 2 also includes Volume Shadow Service, which provides support for backup and disaster recovery. Customers can take snapshot backups of physical machines that will in turn take snapshots of all the virtual machines on that physical host.

Playing catch-up with the mindshare currently held by EMC-owned VMware is rapidly becoming top-of-mind for all the major players in the technology space. With the Open Source-based XenEnterprise already making itself felt (including a relationship with Microsoft), and the market nowhere near saturation point - Virtualization is, without doubt, the hottest area of IT right now.

This release includes:

• AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) compatibility
• Intel Virtualization Technology (IVT) compatibility
• Host Clustering technical white paper
• Active Directory integration using service connection points
• Volume Shadow Service, which provides customers with improved support for backup and disaster recovery. Instead of scheduling downtime for backing up each virtual machine individually, customers will now be able to take snapshot backups of physical machines that will in turn take snapshots of all the virtual machines on that physical host.
• Offline VHD mounting now enables customers to view and manipulate the files in a VHD without having to start the virtual machine. This will now enable administrators to easily deploy scripts and perform virus scans across VHDs without having to start each virtual machine.

Windows Vista will be supported as a guest OS when Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 becomes generally available.

The following beta versions of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 are available for download:

• Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition - Beta 2 (32-bit)
• Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition - Beta 2 (64-bit)

The download ranges in size from 28.4 MB to 29.2 MB, depending on the edition selected. The approximate download time over a 128K connection is 31 minutes.

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