You heard it here first! (?)
The next major release of the All-up Virtual Machine for Business Intelligence will be made available to Microsoft Partners in the near future (No, no word on whether the general public will be able to get their hands on it, and no exact date for partners, either – “soon”.)
This particular platform is based on Windows 2008 R2 and the “November CTP” release wave of products: SQL Server 2008 R2, MOSS 2010, and Office 2010. I’ve been playing with it for just under a couple of hours, and am quite impressed. It includes some interesting wrinkles like the use of sexed-up mapping (Silverlight + Bing for some really nice visualization) and PhotoSynth. It does an excellent job of showing off the new “social” features of MOSS 2010, as well as all the good self-service BI encapsulated in PowerPivot and Report Builder 3.0
If you’re a partner, look sharp and download this sucker as soon as it’s available. You’ll need a large-ish machine to run the image on as it requires 6-8 GB of RAM and about 90 GB of HD space, but it’s worth it. I’m running it with 8 GB, 4 cores with the VHD file on a RAID 0 striped disk, and I’m really happy with performance after the initial warm up.
