Microsoft on Monday unveiled several products and services designed to increase its presence in the market for virtualization technology -- software code that lets businesses run servers and storage devices more efficiently -- and pledged to release new offerings within 30 days.

The company said its Hyper-V Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 products would be available by Oct. 8. Hyper-V Server 2008, Microsoft's core virtualization technology, will be available as a free download from the software maker's Web site. Virtual Machine Manager 2008, a paid offering, provides users with tools needed to manage Microsoft virtualization products.

Microsoft is also enlisting partners in its effort to bring virtualization to mainstream computing. The company said Monday that it has teamed up with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices to help make AMD's Opteron processors more virtualization-friendly. PC manufacturer Hewlett-Packard also pledged to build servers and storage devices designed to fit into virtualized Microsoft environments.

Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, announced that its Sun xVM Server is now fully validated on Windows Server 2008 and said that it plans to offer its Solaris OS as a "certified guest" on Hyper-V 2008.

Long the preserve of business software specialists like IBM and EMC, virtualization is now making its way to the broader market through the efforts of Microsoft and other general-purpose software vendors. "At a lower cost than other data center virtualization solutions, Microsoft software meets customers' needs from the desktop to the data center in an integrated offering on the platform they know," said Bob Kelly, a marketing VP in Microsoft's server and tools unit, in a statement.

In a move that should make it less costly for IT shops to implement virtualized architectures, Microsoft last month said that it is dropping the additional license fees it charges customers when they move server software from one host computer to another. The fee-elimination program applies to 41 Microsoft server applications, including certain editions of SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Dynamics CRM 4.0, SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft's System Center products.

Under the new rules, IT managers will be allowed to port the applications back and forth between host servers as often as they want, without incurring additional costs. The program took effect Sept. 1.

Microsoft is making considerable headway in its efforts to become a bigger player in the enterprise software market. Its server and tools group, home to the virtualization products as well as Windows Server and SQL Server, posted a 21% year-over-year increase in sales in the most recent quarter and an 18% sales jump in the company's most recent fiscal year.