Microsoft today released VS 2005 R2 as a free download.

There has been speculation that this would be the case, well it's true.

Features of interest

• Host Clustering
• iSCSI Support
• x64 Support
• Enhanced PXE Booting
• MOM integration
• The VHD format is now open for licensing
• Linux is supported

List of supported Linux guests

Enterprise distributions:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0

Standard distributions:

• Red Hat Linux 7.3
• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• SuSE Linux 9.2
• SuSE Linux 9.3
• SuSE Linux 10.0