If you want to install the latest technologies of Microsoft (like Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010) you will need to have a 64 bit machine to install everything. The problem is that you want to run a guest virtual machine for development on your 64 bit host. Virtual PC does not run any 64-bit machines, so we need to choose an alternative. After some research, I found Virtualbox from Sun.
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The complete supported list of OS is here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VBox_vs_Others
Everything works very smooth and it even seems faster than my current Virtual PC (or is it because I am using the W2k8 R2 now… 
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