Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Ships

After multiple delays, the first service pack for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft’s hardware virtualization product for hosting virtual machines (VMs) on Windows Server 2003, has finally shipped. In addition to fixing many serious bugs, the service pack adds several important new features, particularly backup for live VMs. This service pack is particularly important to IT shops running production servers on Virtual Server 2005 R2, but the new backup capabilities cannot be exploited by any backup solutions currently on the market.

SP1 Enhances Server Virtualization

SP1 is the latest update to Virtual Server 2005 R5, Microsoft’s hardware virtualization product for servers. In hardware virtualization, only the host OS (the first OS installed on the computer) is communicating directly with the hardware. All the other OSs (called guest OSs when run this way) and applications installed on these OSs run in VMs, which emulate generic resources, including the CPU, memory, disk controller, graphics adapter, and network adapter. A physical computer can run multiple VMs simultaneously. By decoupling the guest OSs and the applications running on them from dependencies on specific hardware, VMs can be created quickly and moved easily between servers.