Well, I'm glad Microsoft is doing this. I've actually done this with my MSDN subscription, created base server machines with an application/server installed, so when I needed one to test with I just copied it over to a new directory and fired it up.
While I do use VMWare almost exclusively, it really excited me when Microsoft opened up their hard drive format for Virtual PC. Having a more open format is good for Microsoft, maybe they'll realize that providing a useful product is more important than putting all this anti-piracy effort into their products making them more and more difficult to use.
Oh boy, I can just imagine the response that's going to get, but honestly, when I was younger, I didn't agree with a lot of things that companies did to protect their software. I really like the ShareWare concept where if you have a product that is useful and works well, people will give you feedback, or support you by sending more money so then next version will have 'such and such' functionality.
A great example of this is the UltraEdit programmers edit (shameless plug to the link on the left). I started using this editor quite some time ago, when it was the only program that he had made public. I liked it so much, I told him what other things I'd like to have and registered the copy I had. Last year I went ahead and got the lifetime license, and pretty much one of the first programs I install is UltraEdit before I do anything else. You can see how far he's come from selling just a basic editor, to now a whole product line of development tools and enhancements.
Back to the VM stuff from Microsoft (I warned you about my rambling)
Here's the link to Microsoft describing the program: http://tinyurl.com/yj8vg5, and now the only dilema I really have is whether I should download Microsofts copy, or keep using all the ones I've already made :)
And by the way, Virtualization is definitely the way things are heading. We're are using it at the company I work, by putting all our development virtual machines on a single server that we access using Terminal Services. The perforamance has been awesome, and we reset the machines each night so we have a clean environment every day. Yes, this does take planning, and yes it requires discipline to check in and save all the code your working on. But man are the results worth it. No longer have to worry about 'breaking' my dev box, because I know we can restore it psuedo-instantly (Bobism, takes more than 1/2 a second, and less than a minute)