With UCS we have the ability to create VM with associates hardware and software profiles (and compnents such as firmware). Nexus 1000V offers facilities of preserving all the network informations and made them consistent even in a long distance vmotion. With vSPhere, iIt's a major step wich permit to definively dessociate hardware and software components. Are you working to create an IEEE standard for hardware description in order to be interoperable with other servers such as HP and so on ? (i think it would be very useful to easily migrate VMs from a datacenter to another)