Clive Watson is one of the Virtualization gurus in the UK and I chatted with him about Microsoft's virtualization technologies which are starting to mature with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V later on in the year.  Clive touches some of the differences when it comes to Microsoft virtualization and other competitive technology and why Microsoft Partners are getting really excited about what we are doing in this area.

It's interesting to note that Virtual Server our current Virtualization offering is free and indeed very powerful - we've had up to 508 Virtual Machines running on a single box - well it was a 32 way server with a lot of RAM but still it demonstrates the power of the platform.

Some of these differences include the management of your virtual and physical estate and how Microsoft's management tools in System Center help you to manage any configuration or scenario that you come across.  This is something you can do with one tool from Microsoft but with other vendors multiple tools are required. 

One of the other things that we discuss is how to get using the latest release of Hyper-V - you need to install two packs which are located on you root drive at Windows\wsv.  This will install the Hyper-V role on your new install of Windows Server 2008 and then you are ready to start virtualizing!

One of the common scenarios is how software developers can make use of the self-provisioning technology in Hyper-V where a dev can create a brand new dev server at the click of a button.  This server could have everything the dev needs to land an app in a test environment, Windows Server, SQL Server, Biz Talk etc. 

As always there's a link to find out more about what we've been talking about: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization