It's official: I talk about virtualization enough that I've added the subject as its own category finally. To inaugurate its new status, I will fittingly discuss the virtualization king, VMware, scoring another victory at the front.

VMware announced today that they have secured deals with four major server manufacturers to embed its ESX hypervisor directly into their shipping product lines, allowing customers to order pre-integrated and configured VMware servers off the shelf. This beats Microsoft's own hypervisor to the punch, which won't be released until the 2008 version of Windows Server comes out later this year. Microsoft will almost certainly do deals of its own with HP, IBM, Dell, and Fujitsu-Siemens... but they'll be playing catch up with vendors who they have historically had strong relationships with.

This sets VMware up with a significant distribution advantage out of the gate, which simply adds to all the other advantages they already enjoy in the virtualization market. To tweak Microsoft's nose even further, they also announced today that they were able to surpass the single-system hosting record for Exchange server by virtualizing it into a number of instances on a single IBM x3850 M2 16-way server. While this may not seem like a terribly big deal (other than, of course, demonstrating their product's ability to utilize hardware more efficiently), to me it speaks to the inherent limitations of Microsoft's server system and the inefficiencies of Windows in general. It's always been something of a Travesty that best practice for Windows servers included dedicating a box to each application; to see now that even that approach is so inefficient that breaking the server's resources into pieces, introducing the overhead of VM management, and running multiple separately licensed instances is actually faster than just dedicating the server to Windows and one installation of Exchange should put someone in Redmond to shame.