Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 – Killing Vmware

Steven Bink who was lucky enough to go to Microsoft IT Forum 2005 in Barcelona is reporting that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available.

“We saw a cool demo of a Running Virtual Machine migrating from a failing Virtual Server host to another Virtual Server host. This was done using new Mom technology, Microsoft cluster services and Windows 2003 Server R2.” – Steven Bink

What is really impressive about this announcement is the price. Virtual Server was a $799 and $1200 product when it was first released with this release being the SP1. Somewhere along the course of beta testing however, Microsoft decided to make this SP1 patch into an R2 and charge more.

The new pricing? $99 for standard, $199 for enterprise. This is how you kill two birds with one stone. You please your enterprise customers that didn’t buy it under SA because they were just testing it against VMware, and you bring in a ton of new customers who would otherwise be going to Vmware GSX server, now a part of IBM. I don’t know about you but I’m happy.