Microsoft decided to not make available VS 2005 for MSDN subscribers. Anyway the company arranged a special promotion:
The VS and MSDN teams have collaborated to create a special offer for Virtual Server 2005 Standard and Enterprise Editions which are being made available only to MSDN Universal and MSDN Enterprise
subscribers between October 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005. This is a special promotional offer.
MSDN Universal and Enterprise level subscribers are being granted special access to Virtual Server 2005 Standard and Enterprise Editions as downloads from MSDN Subscriber Downloads only. Virtual Server 2005 Standard and Enterprise Editions will not be made available by fulfillment or in the monthly subscription shipments.
This is the full retail, production version of the product and does not include the typical MSDN restrictions of running only in dev/test environments and can be run in production (except on XP Pro).
This makes sense: VMware doesn’t give away GSX Server to MCTs, so why Microsoft shouldn’t do the same with Virtual Server? Hey! wait a moment: Microsoft make available any kind of products on MSDN… why not Virtual Server…?