h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Microsoft is now, as promised, offering the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise edition as a free download. There is a couple of licensing issues that are interesting:

In addition to the license terms of this downloaded software, you are also granted rights to use the software to provide hosted services. End customers receiving this software service are not required to obtain their own Microsoft software licenses. End customers receive the right to interact with functionalities of Microsoft software through the services of the provider's hosted environment.

...

Combined with the new usage rights in Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, which allow four concurrent guest OS instances to run under the one Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, the use of virtualization will grow rapidly

As far as I can tell, that means that you are now allowed to host services for external customers on up to four virtualized Windows Server 2003 R2 servers based on the purchase of one Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise license. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Also worth noting, is that Microsoft actually provided a link to VMWAre in the newsletter I received announcing the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise availability:

VMware also provides a free server virtualization product, which is available as a download.

Interesting that Microsoft would inform and link to a competing product, I can't really imagine that they've done that before.

The Microsoft Script Repository has been updated as well, with some interesting scripts for Virtual Server users