My first big conference while working for SkillTeam, I will be visiting this week the Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days in Gent, Belgium. On this two day event, I will also attend the pre-conference day, focusing for IT professionals into Microsoft’s effort in Virtualisation solutions.

Microsoft currently offers already a few interesting products.  I personally find them not yet up to par with VMWare, but they are making a nice effort.  Their Virtual PC is the VMWare’s Workstation counterpart, where you can run virtual machines mainly for development and testing purposes.  Virtual Server looks very much the same, but is actually limited in on-hands features, although the server integration is better.  The not yet available – not even in Beta – offering is their Virtualisation services on the coming Longhorn server platform.

Licensing

I normally don’t stop when it comes to thinking about licenses, but Microsoft already offers their current virtualisation solutions for free for anyone, and even the full Virtualization solution running on/under Longhorn will be “free” (if you pay the dough for Longhorn, offcourse).  On top of these virtual environments – and even the VMWare and Parrallels’ environments – you are since december 2005 only supposed to make sure you have the necessary licenses for the necessary processes in running virtual machines.  Having 4 virtual machines in stand-by as backup can be done without having 4 licenses ready, and if you have in a 8 processor physical machine a SQL server running 2 virtual processors, you only have to license for these 2 virtual processors. Even more special are the R2 releases of Windows Server 2003, where the Enterprise Edition comes with 4 virtual licenses per physical license, and the Datacenter license includes any Windows Server 2003 edition license for an unlimited amount of virtual machines.

If you want to review the presentations of today, you can visit this link .