As virtualization moves beyond test & dev, and into production infrastructure projects, we're seeing a lot more security awareness as companies are doing the initial planning of virtualization projects. Depending on how you break out costs, security is commonly 30-40% of the software costs (obviously it's a much lower percentage if you're looking at the whole project cost, including hardware). Our Virtual Network Firewall has a list price of $1,500 per ESX host.

On the security approach question, VMsafe will be available with ESX 4.0. It will provide essentially the same feature set as our current product, but with a simpler deployment model. Rather than moving the VMs into a secured vSwitch, we will hook into the current vSwitch via the VMsafe APIs. For most people the issue is less about the method for packet processing, and more about the necessary feature set, such as full support for VMotion / DRS, and tight integration with VirtualCenter to keep in sync with the constantly changing VM inventory.