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Last year Microsoft announced that it would begin giving away Virtual PC rather than charging for it and yesterday they made good on that promise [announcing the immediate availability of the new Virtual PC 2007][1]. Virtual PC 2007 comes in two flavors, one for 32-bit systems and one for 64-bit systems.
The new version adds support for Windows Vista as a host, Windows Vista as a guest and improved performance compared to Virtual PC 2004, which Microsoft began giving away last year.
For the suspicious among you who find it hard to believe that Microsoft would give anything away, the company claims that "virtualization technology moving forward will be in the management and the operating system rather than in the virtualization stack." So I guess the value is in the OS, not the virtualization of the OS. Perhaps that's why lower-end versions of Vista aren't licensed for virtualization.
Microsoft is obviously pushing Virtual PC as a means to maintain legacy and custom applications that don't work with Vista, rather than as a way to run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side as many virtualization enthusiasts like to do. For that there's always [Wine][3].
Virtual PC 2007 seems squarely aimed at large corporate enterprise users who would like to upgrade to Vista but need to support custom legacy software. To that end the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 page [points out][2] that users can "install up to four copies of the operating system in virtual machines on top of Windows Vista Enterprise with a single license."
The new Virtual PC 2007 is available for download from Microsoft's website.
[1]: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en "Download Virtual PC 2007"
[2]: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx "Virtual PC 2007"
[3]: http://www.winehq.com/ "Wine"
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