Announcing Virtual Server 2005 SP1 Beta

Thursday, 21 April 2005 by Michel Roth

This morning at Microsoft Management Summit 2005, Steve Ballmer announced the availability of Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta.

SP1 contains the latest software updates for Virtual Server 2005. SP1 includes the following new features (detailed later in this post):

� Support for additional host operating systems, including 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP
� Virtual Disk Precompactor
� Performance enhancements
� Built-in support for network installations
� Reserved disk space for saved state files
� Virtual floppy disk for pre-loading virtual SCSI drivers
� Support for hyperthreading

In addition to these features, Steve announced that support will be expanded for third-party operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, and other x86 operating systems to better meet the needs of customers with heterogeneous environments. Steve also announced that we are licensing royalty-free our VHD file format to promote a consistent and widely-adopted virtual machine file format for Windows to dramatically improve security, reliability and cost efficiency for customers.

Read more and learn how to sign up for the beta here.