With WinHEC 2006 going on, this is a big news week for Microsoft. I blogged about FlexGo yesterday, but they also unveiled their virtualization road map (press release here). Their roadmap contains three main points:

• A commitment to release new Windows Server virtualization that is supported deep in the operating system. This is called hypervisor technology and will RTM 180 days after the release of Windows Server Longhorn. This is the most interesting part of the road map and something that I have been looking forward to for some time. The possible benefits of this to grid computing are enormous: the more the OS supports virtualization the easier it will become to instantiate virtualized sandboxes for secure and unintrusive distributed computing. Of course, my hope is that this technology will make it down into some Windows Vista SKU.
• The Microsoft Center Virtual Machine Manager. A way to manage the virtual machines from a centralized location. Not too much to say about this. Makes sense.
• The intent to acquire Softricity. Their SoftGrid software is a desktop provisioning product that eases deployment issues for large enterprises. This makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to be able to better support enterprise customers continuing to reduce the total cost of ownership for the Microsoft platform. It seems that there is potential synergy between the FlexGo provisioning server system and the Softricity SoftGrid software virtualization — though it doesn’t look like Softricity is currently part of the FlexGo technology.

Side note: Softricity’s product name embodies one of the reasons we at Digipede avoided the term grid for so long . . . there product looks cool, but I wouldn’t call it a grid.