It's no suprise.. By putting the price tag on it they are in compliance with the court ordered lack of innovation clause. Can't add free stuff to your product otherwise you'll get sued.

No Hyper-V on Itanium? Ah well, at least you can use Virtual Machines on HP Integrity servers to do the same thing only with hp-ux, Windows and Linux. I just wish M$ would see sense and ship Exchange for Itanium so I could tell our email admins where to shove Domino/Notes.

1) Windows Server 2008 Standard with Hyper-V (32-bit)

2) Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V (32-bit)

3) Windows Server 2008 Standard with Hyper-V (64-bit)

4) Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V (64-bit)

5) Enterprise Edition with Hyper-V (32-bit)

6) Enterprise Edition without Hyper-V (32-bit)

7) Enterprise Edition with Hyper-V (64-bit)

8) Enterprise Edition without Hyper-V (64-bit)

9) Datacenter edition with Hyper-V (32-bit)

10) Datacenter edition without Hyper-V (32-bit)

11) Datacenter edition with Hyper-V (64-bit)

12) Datacenter edition without Hyper-V (64-bit)

13) The Web Server edition (32-bit)

14) The Web Server edition (64-bit)

15) Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based systems

That list doesn't include

16) Small Business Server 2008 aka Cougar, which will support up to 50 users,

and

17) Centro which is for the mid market, for domains of 50-300 users.

The licensing madness started with Vista continues into the server realm.

Certified by Bill.

With a Small Business Server offering you could have 16 flavours.

But it's only 8 SKUs - when you buy Windows Server you get both the 32 and 64 bit versions in one box

So people are going to abandon VMWare for a windows-based hypervisor? What happens when your hypervisor crashes because of a buffer overflow in one of your VMs?

Not something I'd stake the farm on...

And just think you could buy Leopard Server for your Mac and it comes in one flavour that works on all hardware and has unlimited licenses and is 64 Bit and....

Surely MS must realise before long that so many options does not always equal better choice.

Well, that'll make me ditch my 5 SAN-attached VMware ESX hosts. After all, we've been using VMware ESX server in production for three and a half years. The whole "stable and working" thing is boring. I was thinking of using Xen, since that seemed somewhat iffy in some respects, but Hyper-V has a much cooler name and, more excitingly, is likely even less-well-tested than Xen! I can go back to the days of getting constant calls and pages from system monitoring tools. Hurray!

Is to change from 12 to 8 months in a year. Or however many it takes.

@Scott: The client-license issue is a big chunk of what got us an Apple XServe at my last job. No client licensing stupidity, better compatibility with the departments using Macs than "Services for Macintosh", and no downside for the PC users.

Obviously there are situations where OS X Server wouldn't be the top choice - but there are more of them than I think a lot of people realize.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb726965.aspx

Anyone running ActiveDirectory to manage their users is only getting 1/5th to 1/200th the performance their hardware is capable of...

http://www.symas.net/slamd_reports/

Would you like to summarise your findings into something meaningful, why are AD users only getting up to 1/200th of the hardware permformace?

here we go again, more painful days spent trying to sort out M$ licencing and to get the grinding server o/s to go faster than a dog with no legs. If it was my decision I'd get shot of all our M$ crap, servers and desktops but the muppet desktop users can't cope with anything that's not Vindoze and Office and my erstwhile colleagues have only ever experienced Exchange.

ha! I get to use the Gates is Satan icon! (sorry Paris but you've been mine twice today, luv)