Be the solution.

Microsoft virtualization solutions help place your company on the leading edge of technology.

Appliance Test Drive — VHD Test Drive Program

Selecting the right enterprise software applications for your business can be a difficult, costly and time-consuming task. The Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Test Drive Program provides customers with an enhanced Windows Server-based software evaluation experience that can be deployed faster and easier than conventional software evaluation. The VHD Test Drive delivers pre-built and pre-configured software solutions from Microsoft and its partners on Windows Server-based virtual machines. The virtual appliances are created in the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format, a common virtualization file format that captures the entire virtual machine operating system and the application stack in a single file. Using the power of virtualization, you can download the Microsoft and partner solutions and evaluate them in your own environment without the need for dedicated servers or complex installations.

Evaluate Microsoft solutions

Just download the free VHD software image for easy setup and testing in a safe and contained virtual environment. It’s that simple. The evaluation takes place isolated from currently installed tools and applications. And because it’s virtual, provisioning of additional hardware is no longer necessary.

Evaluate partner solutions

Microsoft offers independent software vendors the chance to build, update, configure and deliver virtual appliances on top of Microsoft solutions via the VHD Test Drive Partner Program. Partners around the world take advantage of this opportunity.

If you would like to feature your virtual appliances here, become a VHD Test Drive Partner by contacting vhdinfo@microsoft.com.

See the listings below to evaluate Partner Solutions.

Citrix

The Citrix EVA for XenApp enables customers and partners to evaluate both online and offline application virtualization with XenApp 5 for Windows Server 2008.

DataCore

Free, Ready to Run, DataCore™ Virtual SAN Appliance. This Virtual SAN Appliance software places shared storage for virtual machines and physical servers at your fingertips.

Odyssey Software Inc.

Athena-enabled device management functions extend and complement the native capabilities of Configuration Manager 2007 for Windows Mobile and Windows CE Embedded devices.

Prism Microsystems

The VHD is a pre-configured, fully functional trial of EventTracker. This image comes with EventTracker including change monitoring and the EventTracker Event Portal, Event Log Central.

ThinPrint

ThinPrint .print Server Engine 7.6 is installed on Windows 2003 R2 and allows for evaluation of V-Layer, universal printer driver, bandwidth control and compression.

Featured VHD image

Discover Windows 7 today with the free 90-day Eval VHD!

Success Story

“Citrix has been using the VHD Test Drive Program for several years. The program is a great way to distribute our combined solutions with Microsoft for fast and easy evaluation in a Windows-based virtual environment. With the pre-built and pre-configured virtual appliances, our customers can experience Microsoft and Citrix virtualization solutions with less time and resources for installation and configuration.”

-Abolfazl Sirjani, VP, Microsoft Technology & Standards Strategy, Citrix