Excerpt:

While Mac OS X Leopard was the focus of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference early in August, the event served as the backdrop for major moves in the platform’s virtualization market. For a moment, three vendors were standing, but as the cheers of the Mac faithful at the keynote address faded, one took a dive.

For ages the lone developer of Mac virtualization software, Microsoft unexpectedly announced that it would stop developing Virtual PC for Mac. This move coincided with VMware’s entry into the Mac market and startup Parallel Software International’s defense of its turf with an announcement of a major upgrade.

Virtualization giant VMware announced that by the end of the year, it would jump into the ring with a beta that would be able to run Windows Vista.

Parallels, a small company based in Herndon, Va., and less than a year old, announced that it would beat VMware to the punch and ship a Vista-ready, final release version of Parallels Desktop before VMware delivered its beta.

At WWDC, however VMware had the goods, previewing pre-beta VMware code running Windows Vista Beta and AutoCAD on a Mac Book Pro. The company said that the Linux and Windows versions of VMware formed the core of the Mac version.

Quote from the article:

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) indicated that it will not develop a new version of Virtual PC, its PC emulation software.

“Mac BU has made the decision not to move forward with a Universal version of Virtual PC at this time; however, current Virtual PC customers will continue to receive product support,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement.

“Developing a high-quality virtualization solution, such as Virtual PC, for the Intel-based Mac is similar to creating a version 1.0 release due to how closely the product integrates with Mac hardware,” the statement concluded.

Virtual PC’s performance is considerably slower than virtual machine software such as Parallels Desktop, which is available for Intel-based Macs, or Boot Camp, Apple’s beta software that enables an Intel Mac to run Windows natively.

Microsoft recognizes the need for some Mac users to access Windows applications, and suggests that “alternative solutions offered by Apple and other vendors, combined with a fully packaged retail copy of Windows, will satisfy this need.”

Full article at Macworld

The first was that Virtual PC (Microsoft.com) (for PCs) would be free. Virtual PC for Macs would not be free. They also mentioned that virtual PC 2007 (VPC 2007) was in development and that it would support Windows Vista in both host and guest modes, as well sa support for 64-bit Vista as a host OS, and that it will be faster than Virtual PC 2004.

The second (and fairly relevant to us) involves how Windows Vista Enterprise will be handled in a virtualized environment:

Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device. Even better, nothing in the license requires that Microsoft Virtualization technologies be used – if you want to use a competing product as your Virtualization solution, you still get the four extra installs for use with VMs.