Microsoft finalizes System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

... and really needs to work on simplifying their product names. :) Here's some info from Microsoft: Today, Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM08 R2). General availability through volume licensing will be October 1. Please know that an additional feature of SCVMM08 R2 is the ability to manage VMs running on VMware vSphere 4.0. The functionality will be the same customers experience using SCVMM08 to manage VMware ESX. Overall, early adopter customers like Lionbridge Technologies, Continental Airlines, Indiana University Auxiliary IT, MaximumASP and Sporton have been really pleased with their experience running SCVMM 2008 R2 and find it especially complimentary when deployed alongside Windows Hyper-V 2.0. I hadn't heard about vSphere 4.0 support. I believe that is new. More information about today's news can be found on the System Center blog: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has RTM’d and GA via volume licensing is set for October 1. This is great news for all and I’d like to especially thank our VMM 2008 R2 Development, Product Management, and Test teams. Lots of hard work fueled by their passion in virtualization and management has resulted in a very good software release. A 180-day evaluation version is now available, too, on the Microsoft Download site. You can access it here. Please experience for yourself what the 10,000+ people who have previously downloaded our ‘Release Candidate’ plus organizations such as Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Technologies, and Indiana University have seen with VMM 2008 R2! I encourage everyone to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4. To learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, please try to attend our upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Ove