During these months several rumors went around about the upcoming last Virtual Server updated before the new Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian). Today, Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager Windows Virtualization, during an official webcast, definitively unveiled what's coming with codename vNext:

• Intel Virtualization Technology and AMD I/O Virtualization Technology CPUs support This won't further improve performances of Windows guest OS but will improve other OSes performances.
• Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Service (VSS) support This unluckly won't provide virtual machines live backup as many expected, but will just automate operations of saving VM state, shutdown it and restore it at the saved state.

As already reported there will be no support for 64bit guest OSes until Windows Hypervisor. Jeff also stated there will be a public beta program in 1H 2006.