A blank page has appeared on Connect that informs us a Beta for Virtual PC 2007 is on the way. It will be publicly available on the 11th of October. No other details are available.
Virtual PC 2004 is now a free product and one that any self respecting sys admin should aim to use. VMware’s excellent alternative still requires a purchase, giving Microsoft an advantage. VPC allows you to run virtual machines just like you can with Virtual Server 2005 R2. In fact, the machines are compatible.
I’ve used VPC before for lab work and for testing. Where I also see it being useful is where you want administrators to use non-admin accounts for day-to-day office work such as email and browsing and a dedicated account for admin work. Run-As is painful to use (who wants to keep banging in the password?) so an alternative is to run a VM with only the admin tools installed. The administrator can log into their physical machine with a non-admin account and into a VM with their admin account. This isolates their email and internet activity from their administrative rights and provides a layer of defense against viable threats.
Windows Vista Enterprise (requires software assurance) will include a virtualisation solution built into the OS. I’m guessing now that VPC 2007 will be a solution for those who do not buy Vista with software assurance.