Virtualization

Missed this one last week - I'm not sure what has changed since RC1 except for about 2000 builds.
Grab it here.

Something I stumbled upon today on MS's site:

Microsoft Forefront and System Center Demonstration Toolkit

This is a unified virtual-machine based demo environment containing Forefront and System Center products.

You can demo:

1. System Center Configuration Manager pushing Forefront Client Security signatures to keep a client machine updated
2. Forefront Security for Exchange Server blocking viruses in emails received in Outlook 2007
3. System Center Operations Manager monitoring the health of servers and clients in the environment
4. Intelligent Application Gateway adapting user access to SharePoint 2007 based on end-point policy detection
5. Forefront Client Security performing Real-time Protection against malware.

All from a single host!

The much delayed VS 2005 R2 SP1 release is getting closer to release. The biggest and best feature is better Windows Vista support. You can download the RC here.

Other noteworthy items:
Support for hardware-assisted virtualization
Support for greater than 64 virtual machines on x64-based hosts
VHD Mount command-line tool and APIs
Tested for interoperability with SCVMM Beta 2 RC
Interoperability with Volume Shadow Copy Service.
Support for additional Guest and Host Operating Systems
Service Publication using Active Directory Service Connection Points
Host clustering whitepaper
Virtual SCSI fix for Linux guests
Larger default size for dynamically expanding virtual hard disks
VMRC ActiveX control and Internet Explorer Security Zones
IVMGuestOS::Get_OSName property returns more operating system information

You can read much more about the release here.