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The CDs are being pressed following the release of code to manufacturing and it should be available for volume retail in the first week of December.

As well as improved performance, support for disaster recovery and legacy application migration, the latest version is designed for greater scalability. For example, there is failover of virtual sessions from one host to another in the case of hardware failure.

There's also native

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64-bit application support (Virtual Server runs natively within a 64-bit Windows host operating system) and, in terms of memory resource allocation, it supports memory resizing at virtual machine boot time.

Reflecting Microsoft's intention to bring virtualisation to SMBs (small and medium sized businesses) as well as the larger scale enterprise, the Standard Edition is priced at $99 (supports 1 to 4 physical processors) and the Enterprise Edition of Virtual Server 2005 R2 is $199 (supports all physical processors supported by the host operating system).

'We've changed our entire licensing model, across our whole server product line' declared Microsoft's senior VP of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, speaking about the company's attempts to make virtualization to 'catch on'. 'Our licences apply to a device, and you can run multiple sessions on that device.'

More info can be found on the Microsoft website.