Support for 3rd Party OS's in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005!

Now that I have your attention, you did read the title correctly!!!!!!!! I was priveleged to be in the audience this morning for Steve Ballmer's keynote, whi include a number of really cool points... To summarise in my words:

We are expanding support for 3rd party guest OSs in Virual Server 2005, including Linux, Solaris and other x86 operating systems....

We are commited more than ever to provide interoperability in heterogenous environments and to demostrate this, several demos were done showing how MOM 2005 can be used 'agentless' to control Sun boxes running both Windows Server 2003 and Solaris.

There was also an awesome demo using SMS 2003 SP1 and the OS Deployment feature pack to upgrade to Windows XP including SP2 on the fly 100 pc's running a mixture of Windows 2000 and Windows XP in 10 minutes.... Kudos to Bill Anderson and his team!

On top of all that, there are also a number of improvements to Virtual Server with Service Pack 1 (due out later this year) including:

   3rd party OS support (as mentioned above!)

   64 bit host support (now you can run those VM's from a RAM disk!)

   an estimated 30% increase in performance (I am not privvy to all the details but will let you know when I find out)

We are also opening up the .vhd standards to enable and promote extensibility.

IMHO these and other announcements etc at MMS signals a huge step forward in terms of tackling some of the biggest challenges we face in our organisations in terms of reliability, extensibilily and interoperability in Managing our enviroments....