This week is Microsoft’s IT infrastructure conference for EMEA – the IT Forum. Last year I missed it because my wife was heavily pregnant (and my son was born that week). This year, of course, it was his first birthday, so I’m missing it again. Not to worry, because Paul Thurrott is covering the major stories in the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update and John Howard’s blog has much more information.

One of the IT Forum news stories concerns Virtual Server 2005 R2 (formerly SP1). A few weeks back I wrote about Microsoft’s virtualisation roadmap and several news sources are reporting that in his keynote speech, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 has been released to manufacturing. Furthermore, the new pricing model is just $99 for Standard Edition and $199 for Enterprise Edition – it seems that Microsoft really is serious about competing with VMware. At that price for Virtual Server, and with the VMware Player attacking the low end market (although I’ve heard mixed reports about how good it really is at handling Microsoft VMs), it’s hard to see where Virtual PC fits in all of this.