Mike Neil, Microsoft's General Manager of Virtualization Strategy, announced on Thursday that Microsoft will delay delivery of two of its virtualization solutions - the much anticipated Viridian and the Service Pack 1 release for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. Neil wrote in his blog entry: "As the person who oversees the development plans, teams and strategy for Microsoft's virtualization software on desktops Mike Neil, Microsoft’s General Manager of Virtualization Strategy, announced on Thursday that Microsoft will delay delivery of two of its virtualization solutions – the much anticipated Viridian and the Service Pack 1 release for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. Neil wrote in his blog entry:“As the person who oversees the development plans, teams and strategy for Microsoft’s virtualization software on desktops and servers, I want to update everyone on the timing of our server virtualization offerings. I know that many of our customers and partners will hear of these changes from their usual Microsoft contacts, but I wanted to personally explain some of the reasons behind the new schedule for Windows Server virtualization (codename Viridian) and Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1. But first, here’s where we stand today:The public beta of Windows Server virtualization will ship in the second half of 2007, not in the first half as previously disclosed. The final version of Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 now will be available in Q2, not Q1 as previously stated. In the interim, customers and partners can download a Release Candidate (RC) version later this month – this is code complete and an update to the current beta 2.”According to Neil, the change in schedule for Viridian can be attributed to performance and scalability. “We’re designing Windows Server virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I’m proud to say is something no other vendor’s product supports.” He continued, “We still have some work to do to have the beta meet the “scale up” bar we have set. Also, we’re tuning Windows Server virtualization to run demanding enterprise IT workloads, even I/O intensive workloads, so performance is very important and we still have some work to do here.”The MSVS 2005 R2 SP1 update is also being delayed. Instead of being released in Q1 as expected, it should be released sometime this quarter. So, why the delay? According to Neil, Microsoft required some additional testing time on the service pack because of the new guest operating system support that has been added – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Solaris 10 and the most recent CTP release of Windows Server Longhorn. And like Viridian, Microsoft is concerned with increasing scalability on MSVS 2005 R2. SP1 will allow the product to scale to 64 VMs on 32-bit hosts and 512 VMs on x64 hosts. So what now? You’ll probably read many articles from those that will criticize Microsoft for the delay and far fewer from those that praise them for trying to get it right (or at least, as close to right as possible) the first time out the gate. And you will probably see the competition take this as an opportunity to expand their own current market size, hoping that it gives them more time to get their own solutions implemented into the wild. For the rest, it becomes a waiting game. Software Development