Q&A: Microsoft's Bob Muglia discusses virtualization plans: Senior vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server division:  "Today, we have a product called Virtual Server that sits on top of Windows and provides virtualization capabilities. In the future, we're going to build the hypervisor and the virtualization stack into Windows. So while it's a whole new set of technologies, much, if not all, of what Virtual Server does today goes into the operating system. It becomes an operating system feature. .. I think about the '07 generations of the operating system, say '07-'08 as all being Longhorn, maybe even to '09 for Longhorn R2. .. the virtualization features are in the Longhorn time frame, but it's not in the initial release of Longhorn .. " 

The Register's interpretation:  "Microsoft has planned a long, slow death for the Virtual Server product it acquired in 2003.  Redmond will stop selling a standalone partitioning product when the server version of its "Longhorn" operating system arrives... It looks like Microsoft plans to "featurize" at least basic server partitioning functions and give the technology away with the OS. VMware, however, apparently has little to fear until 2009. The virtual machine market will keep kicking back cash to the software maker and its owner EMC."

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