I’m glad to see that Microsoft is listening to its customers who have been telling us for some time now that it wasn’t “on” to only support Windows on Virtual Server.  Well now (as of Monday April 3rd), MS have announced that we will support Linux as well and that Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition will be available at for free.

 

More detail from the announcement here:  This is the full Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise edition available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions that we shipped in Q4 CY2005. This is not a trial or a limited version in any way.  This is a fully-supported product, not some unsupported Trojan horse designed to get you to update a multi-thousand dollar per-processor, per-server product. Virtual machines created today with Virtual Server will be able to migrate into our hypervisor based Windows virtualization. This is a risk free proposition and it’s the real deal.

 

Why are we doing this?  We want to continue the tremendous momentum we’ve had with the Virtual Server R2 release and we’ve already stated publicly that we’re developing virtualization technology going into Longhorn Server so we want people getting used to the idea that virtualization should be free.

 

More detail on the Linux support (see below) and availability of our VM Additions for Linux.

 

Supported Linux guest operating systems within Virtual Server R2 are:

  • Enterprise distributions:
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
    • SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

 

  • Standard distributions:
    • Red Hat Linux 7.3
    • Red Hat Linux 9.0
    • SuSE Linux 9.2
    • SuSE Linux 9.3
    • SuSE Linux 10

 

You can read a lot more detail on the Virtual Server website.