Attention Microsoft.
Your left hand has announced that you will ONLY be releasing Exchange 12 (vaporware date of late 2006) and SBS Longhorn in 64 bit editions (vaporware date of mid 2007?).
Your right hand has indicated you won’t have Virtual 64 bit guest capability until the Longhorn Server Wave (vaporware date of mid 2007?)
Do you see the issue?
The issue is that the primary use of MS Virtualization[1] is testing. Especially something like complicated multi-machine interconnected systems like Exchange. Most especially, betas of coming versions of those complicated interconnected systems like say Exchange.
Many companies, developers, and consultants use virtual environments to prove out Exchange configurations and functionality and programmability. I have no less than 5 or 6 virtualized full Exchange test environments with GCs and Exchange servers, the whole ball of wax, that I have to use to support your products for some of your biggest customers. I know virtualization of DCs and Exchange wasn’t supported by MS until very very recently but I have been doing this for years. Your own MCS folks have been doing it for years as well, I taught a few of them how to more easily deal with the OS Activation stuff and how to use scripts to modify the virtual machine files, etc to quickly duplicate environments.
Right now the only answers I see are those coming from the competitor. How many of your customers are you willing to push towards VMWARE? I have to imagine that EMC (owners of VMWARE) must have cheered at the 64 bit only announcement since they are actually getting close on 64 bit guests with experimental support in GSX 3.2 for various Linux-64 flavors. In Workstation 5 they have experimental support for 64 bit Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP….
joe
[1] Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Folks who are going whole hog virtualization for live production are mostly using VMWARE ESX.
