Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition will allow one free virtual machine

The unexpected announcement of Hyper-V beta 1 this December brought another major news which passed almost unobserved: besides having 4 licensed virtual machines for Enterprise Edition and unlimited licensed virtual machines for Datacenter Edition, now Microsoft allows 1 licensed VM for Standard Edition.

This change in the licensing scheme is very welcome and will simplify adoption of new hypervisor in small companies where only one service must be isolated (typically the web server).