Rodney Buike posted an interesting article on an interesting problem.  The [very] shortened story is SM Internet Solutions have a customer running their production SBS servers in VMs.  These production VMs are hosted by Beta 2 of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.

I highly recommend reading the post (takes about 10 minutes) “From the Trenches - Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2″ and some snippets are below:

  • A small (15 user) Private Wealth Management client with very aggressive growth plans for the next 3-5 years
  • They required Enterprise grade data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, along with ease of use but at a SMB price
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit for the host OS
  • in addition to the host OS, up to 4 virtualized Windows 2003 Server instances on the same physical server. 
  • Being able to spread the payments for all software purchased under the Open Value Licensing program over 3 years made for easy purchase approval.
  • Purchasing Small Business Server under Open Value Licensing, along with Software Assurance, also allowed for the software purchase price to be spread over 3years
  • By purchasing under Open Value Licensing along with Software Assurance the client will also be able to take their old server and use is as an offsite dark spare