I’ve been testing MS Virtual Server 2005 for some time, and I love it. It’s been released to manufacturing (RTM) and will soon ship for sale.

The Web administrative interface is very well done, and with sufficient hardware (which is required any time you’re going to run multiple simultaneous machines), you can effectively share resources between multiple virtual machines on your server. And yes, you can use your already-existing Virtual PC images on the virtual server.

VMWare gets another run for its money. And by the way, for what it’s worth, I use both the MS and VMWare ESX products, so no need to flame. ;)

Virtual machine server systems are in place and being used for full-blown production purposes at many large companies all over the world. My experience is that is allows for more effective use of available hardware resources, and it simplifies and speeds up server administration. It can also make full server backups a breeze.

To migrate servers from hardware to virtual machines, Microsoft provides the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit. The VSMT automates the migration of an operating system and installed applications from a physical server to a server running within a virtual machine that is provided and managed by Virtual Server 2005.