Good News Everyone: VPC and licensing goodness ensue!
We've got some great news for you today, guys and gals.
Robert McLaws recently made a post on LonghornBlogs asking us to be a little bit more transparent with out plans for Virtual PC. Ask and ye shall receive, Robert :)
As of today, Microsoft has announced that Virtual PC will be availble as a free download to anyone who wants a copy. We've already made Virtual Server available for free, so it only makes sense that Virtual PC should follow suit. (Note: This does not include Virtual PC for Mac.)
Secondly, we've announced plans for a new version of Virtual PC - VPC 2007. While we haven't gone into a great deal of detail about new features of VPC 2007, we have stated that it will include support for Windows Vista as both a host and guest operating system. It will also include support for 64-bit Vista as a host OS, and that VPC 2007 will have increased performance over VPC 2004.
Third, we've announced a change in licensing for Windows Vista Enterprise (and Windows Vista Ultimate if it's under Software Assurance): Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device. Even better, nothing in the license requires that Microsoft Virtualization technologies be used - if you want to use a competing product as your Virtualization solution, you still get the four extra installs for use with VMs.
It's not everything on Robert's wishlist, but it's a pretty good start, eh?
[7/13/2006 1:22 PST : I changed the wording in the last sentence of the paragraph on the licensing changes to say "installs" instead of "licenses" to more accurately indicate what's going on here.
Oh - and welcome Slashdotters :)
- mikekol]
