Microsoft announced the general availability of Virtual Server 2005 today.
Virtual Server 2005 allows you to set up virtual machines. In general, there are three scenario generally addressed by Virtual Server 2005.
You can automation software development and testing environments —
You can create, configure, integrate, and manage virtual machines. These virtual machines can be set up differently to test different scenarios for your applications. Many developers will create virtual machines that contain different operating systems or different configurations of the same operating system. This gives the ability to help insure an application works across platforms without the need for multiple systems.
You can consolidate servers. —
A single physical server can be used to host multiple server-applications.
You can host legacy applications —
By creating a virtual machines to host older applications.
These three scenarios can all be accomplished with either the Standard Edition, which supports up to four processors on a single machine, or the Enterprise edition which can support up to 32 processors on a single machine.
Like many Microsoft products, a trial version of Virtual Server 2005 is available. You can download the 180-day trial from:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/trial/default.mspx
Virtual Server 2005 runs on versions Windows Server 2003. It can also be ran on Windows XP Professional for non-production use.
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