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Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 Ready

Friday, 01 September 2006 by Michel Roth

Following up on their previous beta release in April, Microsoft has just released Beta 2 of their Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. This free service pack adds support for hardware-assisted virtualization, improved backup services and more.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 includes:

• AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) compatibility
• Intel Virtualization Technology (IVT) compatibility
• Host Clustering technical white paper
• Active Directory integration using service connection points
• Volume Shadow Service, which provides improved support for backup and disaster recovery. Instead of scheduling downtime for backing up each virtual machine individually, customers will now be able to take snapshot backups of physical machines that will in turn take snapshots of all the virtual machines on that physical host.
• Offline VHD mounting, which enables viewing and manipulating the files in a VHD without having to start the virtual machine. This will now enable administrators to easily deploy scripts and perform virus scans across VHDs without having to start each virtual machine.
• Windows Vista will be supported as a guest OS when Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 becomes generally available.

Read more here.