Today Microsoft released the second service pack for both Server 2008 and Vista. Along with a slew of patches and a handful of compatibility updates, SP2 brings an exciting new capability:

SP2 provides the Hyper-V virtualization environment as a fully integrated feature of Windows Server 2008, including one free instance with Windows Server 2008 Standard, four free instances with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and an unlimited number of free instances with Windows Server 2008 Datacenter.

So if you haven’t already taken Hyper-V for a spin, now could be a good time. More SP2 details can be found in this TechNet article.

Here’s the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V FAQ for a leg up on the technology.