Microsoft has long since made their products available for evaluation. But consider this. You’re a busy administrator. You’ve been asked by your boss to have a look at SQL 2005 or ISA 2006. You might not know these products so installing and configuring them is going to be time consuming and difficult. In the end, you will have to invest a lot of time to in configuring the software to fairly evaluate all of the features. This is time wasted because if you like the product then you’re going to have to do this all over again when you buy it.
Yesterday (at VMWorld, I think) Microsoft announced the launch of their VHD Test Drive Program.This will accelerate any evaluation of a Microsoft product by leveraging virtualisation technology. VHD is the disk format that Microsoft uses in their virtualisation products to provide a virtual hard disk. Microsoft has released 4 pre-installed and configured virtual machines so that you can evaluate the installed products. This list (Windows 2003 R2, SQL 2005, ISA 2006 and Exchange 2007) will be expanded to include other products.
Now the evaluation process gets a lot easier. Download and install the free Virtual Server 2005 R2 and install it on a decent machine. Download and install the appropriate evaluation VHD and install it. Then fire up the virtual machine(s) and try out the pre-installed product. The software will naturally have an expiration, e.g. ISA 2006 expires after 30 days.
These VHD’s might be handy for anyone looking to do some testing or self-paced training.