Goin' into Production - Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 released

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I almost missed this one.  I knew that we RTM'ed it last week or so, but I didn't know that we released Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 to the web (in a newly refurbished website on virtualization) so quickly - just yesterday infact on www.microsoft.com/technet/virtualserver.  Way cool! The team and I have been using the Betas in our production/demo environment for a long time now and have found it quite stable and useable.

Some more details from Ben over at Virtual PC Guy's WebLog in case you want some timely information or you can check out the official Windows Server Weblog and their post entitled Service pack for Virtual Server 2005 R2 available.

What does this mean to you - the IT Pro?

  • Official support for hardware virtualization with AMD-V and Intel-VT
  • Command line mounting and usage of VHD files - Very handy!
  • Volume Shadowcopy Services - fastest way to backup a machine
  • No longer being maxed at 64 VMs on a box - if the host box is x64.
  • and much much more... It's free - easy to use and quite powerful.  The Windows Server team has a nice blog entry talking about all the nuances between versions and the like.

There are a number of stories of companies using our virtualization product in a variety of settings and sizes.  I noticed that our Canadian friends over at Rackforce (Rackforce case study) have chimed in on how they use it to provide disaster recovery for their customers. I wonder if they are using the beta of Virtual Machine Manager in our System Center line? It's an awesome management utility that is currently in beta 2.

The importance of using and understanding virtualization is very big. So big - we've brought up an awesome speaker from Redmond (Bryon Surace) to talk about it as a keynote for EnergizeIT...    Have you registered for the Toronto event as of yet??