Microsoft this morning opened its annual TechEd conference focusing on the merits of virtualization ahead of the late summer release of its most important product to date in that area.

The company also unveiled Beta 3 of its Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2.0 software, the Release Candidate of SQL Server 2008, and Forefront security products for Office Communications Server and Windows Server 2008.

This year, TechEd is two conferences. This week's focus is on IT pros while last week's sessions, including a keynote address by Bill Gates, were targeted at developers.

"This week's TechEd is less about announcing what is new and more about how to use and deploy the stuff that is being delivered," says Bob Kelly, corporate vice president for server and tools marketing at Microsoft.

On the virtualization front, Microsoft reiterated that Hyper-V, it core server virtualization product would ship within its newest timeframe. Microsoft has said it would be delivered within 180 days of Windows Server 2008, which launched Feb 28.

In May, the company released Hyper-V Release Candidate (RC) 1, the last planned beta before the code is shipped.

Microsoft said in April that it was ahead of schedule on the new timetable for release of Hyper-V and said that the technology would likely show up in June or July.

"We are feeling pretty good that it won't be up to the full 180 days," Dai Vu, director of virtualization products and solutions in Microsoft's server and tools division, told Network World at Microsoft's Management Summit in April.

Microsoft also unveiled Release Candidate 1 of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, which includes new capabilities for provisioning and streaming applications more efficiently, and virtualization support in its Forefront security software.

Specifically, Forefront Client Security, and the forthcoming "Stirling" management console, will support Hyper-V.
In addition to virtualization tools, Microsoft rolled out Beta 3 of ILM 2.0, which was suppose to happen at the RSA Security Conference in April. ILM is Microsoft's platform for identity synchronization, certificate and password management, and user provisioning. It was originally the company's meta-directory technology and was previously called Microsoft Identity Integration Server.