I have the RTM of Windows 2008 R2 Standard (x64) in our ESX4 environment on a test network, along with a test xp client and a smoothwall linux based firewall/router to allow internet access from our main network into the test network.
Microsoft allows you to try Windows 2008 R2 and you can rearm the 10 day activation grace period 5 times, so you may use it for 50 days to try. I am evaluating this server to see how many licences we want to budget for next year, as we have some servers worth upgrading, and also I would like to up our Domain to 2008 R2.
However I am noticing through vSphere Client that the Windows 2008 R2 OS appears to freeze occasionally. It's happened when creating an OU, adding groups to a user, and even just sitting there doing nothing. It appears as if the mouse and keyboard have no effect. Even the num lock / caps lock states do not change when the guest is in focus. However the Windows XP client can still ping the machine and do remote registry, group policy, etc... so it's not as if the OS is hard locked.... just the I/O is locked. I'm not sure if vSphere is causing this to freeze, but I was just sending a reset to the guest and hard booting it to get working again. So now I enabled remote desktop and will work on this Guest O/S from the XP client via mstsc. I'll let you know if it freezes up that way, but I want to put this post out there to see if anyone else has had the same problem.
