IE6 on XP SP2: Nov 2006: Microsoft offers a free download of "a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007. We hope to continue to provide these images in the future as a service to web developers."  Even with only 6 weeks to go, it might be a useful device for testing.
  5:11:29 PM    

Virtualization: Xen vs. Microsoft vs. VMware:  Nice short comparison chart of the three platforms in their free and paid flavors.
  5:05:30 PM    

Automatically download VMware images:  Thoughtpolice.co.uk offers VMware images ready-to-use for Fedora, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD.  When they issue a new one, they place a torrent link in a file you can download via rsync to torrent the image, all automatically.  Subscribing to virtual appliances is an idea that's been much talked about, and there may finally be a sufficient audience for it.
  12:53:29 AM    

Running Windows on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud with Qemu and Linux:  At first this seems like a kludge, but it has some other benefits:

• "Significantly lower per/hour costs by running several additional Virtual Machines per AMI. This would require a Qemu abstraction / accelerator. You could foresee up to 15+ addition concurrent operation systems.
• Able to more effectively simulate varied operating/hardware environments for easy migration from legacy systems.
• Backups to S3 - Using the Qemu-img tool, instant snapshots can be saved to S3. Used with a versioning system, this could provide for unlimited roll backs.
• VMware compatible - Qemu-img supports vmdk conversion as well as several other formats enabling easy migration from existing virtualized server environments"

Use of QEMU's virtual disk differencing system has appeal.  The big question is the speed of the resulting systems, and any possible limitations from the size of the EC2 virtual machines.
  12:44:01 AM