Microsoft Office Professional 2007 Near-final test

A few of my testing resources are buzzing that real soon now — as in tomorrow, March 19 — Microsoft will release a feature-complete Release Candidate (RC) test build of its Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008.Update on March 19: Those pesky sources were spot-on. Microsoft is making the Hyper-V RC test build available for download today.The new RC build will support an updated list of guest operating systems,Microsoft Office Professional 2010, sources say, which will include: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack (SP) 2, Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 (which, at least for now, is still in beta). Hyper-V RC will support the Standard,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Enterprise and Datacenter versions of Windows Server 2008,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, sources said.Microsoft released to manufacturing the final Windows Server 2008 product on February 4. That release included a non-feature-complete beta of Hyper-V,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, the virtualization technology formerly codenamed “Viridian.”Microsoft has said it will ship the final Hyper-V code within six months after it released Windows Server 2008. Some users have said that delay will lead them to delay deploying Windows Server 2008; others claim that they didn;t have plans to rush out and deploy so the six-month gap won;t matter.I asked Microsoft for official confirmation on its Hyper-V Release Candidate roll-out schedule. A spokeswoman said Microsoft would neither confirm nor deny whether the company planned to roll out the RC of Hyper-V tomorrow.By the way, Microsoft has gone on record saying that the next version of Hyper-V — presumably the one that will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2, due in 2010 — also will be available in hardware-embeddable form.But back to Hyper-V Version 1. While we;re waiting for the downloadable release candidate, does the fact that Hyper-V is closer to being soup affect your evaluation/deployment plans for Windows Server 2008?