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Microsoft announced recently that Service Pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2 has at last emerged from beta. The product is actually a feature that SP1 supports, Volume Shadow Services.

For users of Windows Server 2003 on physical systems, the support is actually good news. After SP1 is installed, their existing VSS software will take similar snapshots of virtual hard drives as well as physical ones.

According to Microsoft the new product would include, a new switch or menu command in the administrator Web site allowing VSS. But if you're running SP1 from XP or Vista, there's no big bonus for you.

In another marketing e-mail today, Microsoft carefully tells a more accurate story. It notifies SP1 downloaders that ‘customers will now be able to take snapshot backups of physical machines, with no downtime, that will in turn take snapshots of all the virtual machines on that physical host.’

That’s how VSS support works, but only for users who already have VSS backup software: That software will now be able to take a backup snapshot whose contents are restricted to the .VHD file, and that file will essentially serve as a VSS snapshot, even if the guest operating system (the one being virtualized) doesn't have VSS support.

Among the list of foreign guest operating systems Virtual Server now supports, you can add Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Solaris 10.