Microsoft's delay culture has carried over to the Virtual Server team with an update to the server slicing product being pushed back to "early 2007."

The Redmond beast now plans to ship a beta of the service pack 1 (SP1) for Virtual Server 2005 R2 in the next 90 days and deliver the final take of the update next year. Microsoft had been looking to have the update done and dusted by the fourth quarter of this year.

Virtual Server joins Windows Vista and Office 2007 in the pantheon of major software projects delayed by Microsoft.

The Virtual Server delay won't please Microsoft customers looking to tap into new virtualization hardware tools in Intel and AMD chips. Such hardware support is the key addition with the update.

Microsoft will also ship its Volume Shadow Services in the update. Storage pros use VSS for backing up data and should see the technology work with virtual operating systems.

"With the service pack, Microsoft customers will be provided with better interoperability, strengthened isolation to help prevent corruption of one virtual machine from affecting others on the same system, and improved performance for non-Windows guest operating systems," a Microsoft spokesperson added.

Customers will still have to wait until 2008 or 2009 to see Micrososft catch up with rivals VMware and Xen and deliver a hypervisor-based Virtual Server product. Unlike the competition, Microsoft runs Virtual Server on top of a standard operating system, while a hypervisor sits underneath the OS. ®

Related stories

• Windows Vista license change tackles virtualization (3 April 2007)
• Analysis Microsoft so very, very proud of its ties to open source Xen (20 July 2006)
• VMware goes way beyond the VM (5 June 2006)
• Microsoft promises bright, complex virtualization future (23 May 2006)
• Gartner: More Windows Vista delays (3 May 2006)
• Linux team tells VMware and Xen to get their acts together (20 April 2006)
• Virtualization for security (13 April 2006)
• Epson unveils 'Windows Vista Capable' PC (4 April 2006)
• Comment A Vista with no view of an EU sunset (4 April 2006)
• Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (3 April 2006)
• Fujitsu Siemens CTO: There's more to life than virtualisation (3 April 2006)
• Microsoft won't open up Office till January (24 March 2006)
• Microsoft re-org elevates Office chief (24 March 2006)
• New mgt. please, demands star Microsoft blogger (23 March 2006)
• Windows Vista slips to 2007 (22 March 2006)
• VMware moves to free with Server product (3 February 2006)
• Interview VMware's Chief promises to play nice with Microsoft and Xen (31 January 2006)
• Xen 3.0 ready to be hammered (6 December 2005)