I was fortunate to get a preview of Microsoft's rollout of their virtualization plan yesterday at Dell's Future of Computing roadshow.

Wow.

Microsoft will be telling the world that, in spite of being nearly a decade late getting to the game, they should be considered a leader in the virtualization market. If you can't get to the game on your own, and you have to purchase other, second-rate companies to actually get there, then the only way to pull it all together (save face) is to redefine the game and the definition of "leader." Microsoft will be saying the only company on the planet that covers all aspects of virtualization is Microsoft. The idea is to include application virtualization, OS virtualization, hardware virtualization and a few other pieces offered by Microsoft. And in that mix is their partnerships with Citrix, by the way. They conveniently leave out storage virtualization, since they don't have a product to address that particular market. 

You will also hear that the reason we need virtualization in the x86 markets is because of all the Windows Servers running at under 10% utilization. What you won't hear is that the reason we have all those underutilized Windows Servers is because we can't install multiple applications on a single instance of their operating systems without them interfering with each other. And, of course we need high-powered hardware just to provide decent response times, by the way.

I also have heard that the concept of moving a live server from one platform to another is not something their customers use, so it's not a priority for them. I suspect they might get a different response from some of their customers who are satisfied with the features of VMware's ESX.

I do agree with one comment made, though. We will have more than one brand of virtualization in our datacenters. And it might all be controlled by Microsoft's software.