Business Tech

The cost benefits of virtualization are well-documented, allowing enterprises to significantly reduce the space and electrical power required to run data centers and streamline the management of an ever-growing number of servers.

Virtualization also provides means for expedient scalability. Given today's economic climate and cost-cutting mandates, it is not surprising that analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that 50 percent of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012.

What many organizations fail to understand, according to Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO of virtualization security provider Altor Networks, is that collapsing multiple servers into a single one with several virtual machines inside eliminates all firewall, intrusion detection, and other protections in existence. Physical security measures literally become "blind" to traffic between VMs, since they are no longer in the data path.

This echoes comments made by Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, who wrote in a recent presentation titled "Securing the Next-Generation Virtual Data Center" (subscription required), that "most virtual machines you deploy will be less secure than the physical systems they replace," and that "virtualization will radically change how you secure and manage computing environments."

VMware recently launched a partner program to help ISVs develop solutions certified as "VMsafe." VMsafe provides API sharing through a secure container, enabling partner companies to access virtual environments. This virtual security technology provides fine-grained visibility over virtual-machine resources, including monitoring every aspect of the system with the ability to address previously undetectable viruses, rootkits, and malware before they can infect a system.

I spoke to Ben-Efraim to better understand the issues around VM security and for what users should be on the lookout. According to him, there are two common approaches that use existing methods to secure virtual-network traffic: using VLANs to separate and control communication between VMs; and taking software-based firewalls and running them as agents on each VM. Unfortunately, both of these approaches fall short.

VLAN segmentation extends the notion of LAN resource segmentation to include VMs. The approach essentially requires that VMs, which can naturally be grouped (i.e. by function or user base), be isolated from other VMs by use of virtual switches and routing (i.e. the human resources VLAN contains HR-serving VMs). However, VLAN segmentation is not a permanent solution to securing environments because of networking complexities, performance degradation, and security limitations of the approach, Ben-Efraim said.

A recent survey suggests that CIOs are loosening the purse strings on IT spending. IT vendors may want to hold off their celebrations, though, because much of the spending appears to be headed for deflationary forces like cloud computing, virtualization, and their kissing cousin, open source.

An economic rebound never looked so dire.

That's unless you're an IT buyer, of course, suggests a new report from Goldman Sachs. In this week's report, titled "A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud," Goldman Sachs said it expects that pent-up IT dollars will flow in the short term to building out next-generation data centers (e.g., cloud computing). But in the long term, less money is expected to find its way into fewer wallets:

After the initial build-out, Cloud Computing could drive some headwinds for the IT industry, as a result of two factors. First, we see virtualization as a deflationary technology. Second, we see IT spending consolidating in the hands of fewer buyers--the Cloud providers, hosting vendors, and large enterprises. These factors will likely dampen IT spending growth due to greater utilization and buyer pricing power.

Even short-term build-outs may prove disappointing, however, as Goldman Sachs expects large enterprises to grow existing virtualization and automation technology adoption in the rollout of private clouds, shifting slowly to an embrace of public clouds over time. The chart below gives some idea as to when cloud computing will hit its stride:

Who wins in this scenario?

According to the report, Red Hat stands to benefit from the cloud-computing craze. ("Red Hat is well positioned for the emerging Cloud Computing ecosystem, largely due to its open source background and current ubiquitous deployments in data centers, including enterprises, as well as in Cloud providers such as Amazon," the report states.)

But the real beneficiaries will be...the same old crew. "[K]ey suppliers for internal Clouds are likely to be those that have the most complete portfolio of hardware, software, and services," including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, EMC, and Oracle.

New boss...same as the old boss.

The other beneficiaries are the start-ups that provide critical components of cloud computing, with an emphasis on management tools. Here we may see open-source companies benefit, including Reductive Labs (Puppet project), Cloudera, and the two rising private cloud companies, VMOps and Eucalyptus, among others.

While open source doesn't factor heavily into this particular Goldman Sachs analysis, the firm has before called out open source's role in wringing more value out of fewer IT dollars. Open source is a primary driver of the global reset in IT spending expectations.

With less money flowing into the pockets of fewer vendors, we can expect to see both increased consolidation and fierce competition for the IT spending that remains. Those vendors that can help CIOs do more with less stand to benefit from this shift to low-cost, high-value computing.

And those that can't? Well, let's just say they may pine for the good old days of the global recession.

Although VMware got its start with a desktop virtualization product aimed at developers, the company today is best known for bringing server virtualization to the mainstream.

Creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical system lets IT departments consolidate applications onto fewer computers and thereby cut costs. Over time, server virtualization has also enabled a variety of products and approaches that can simplify IT operations and generally make data centers more flexible.

VMware has continued to invest in virtualization aimed at the client. This includes client-side hypervisors such as its original VMware Workstation product. However, products and technologies associated with delivering applications and user desktops to the client are really the main focus.

Application and desktop delivery sometimes makes use of client hypervisors but it's a largely separate category of technology that's fundamentally about centrally managing user applications and/or operating-system images. In VMware's case, virtualized desktops fall under the VMware View name.

On Monday, VMware announced VMware View 4, the latest version of its virtual desktop portfolio.

Much of VMware's development focus with View 4 was in the area of the user experience--that is, making applications and desktops delivered from a central location perform with the same responsiveness and fidelity as if they were installed on a local PC, in the usual way.

Historically, this user experience has been one of the stumbling blocks for desktop virtualization in general. Older forms of Citrix Presentation Server (now rebadged and modernized under the XenApp label) and initial virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations very much tried to simplify management and otherwise deliver direct benefits for IT operations. Whether users liked using the products was secondary.

As a result, desktop virtualization has been mostly something used by what are often called "task workers." Think call centers and other groups of users with specific jobs to do and not much say about the tools they use to do it. In general, desktop virtualization promoters have focused too much on delivering benefits to IT and not enough on delivering benefits to users. (They've also arguably paid too little attention to keeping up-front costs down and relied too much on promises of soft cost savings down the road.)

One of the technology pieces that VMware is leaning on to improve user experience is the PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP). PCoIP was originally developed by Teradici to improve the responsiveness and display quality of virtual desktops. However, in Teradici's initial implementation, specialized hardware was needed on both ends of the wire. This effectively made it a premium solution for situations in which cost wasn't a factor, such as for financial traders and government agencies for which security considerations are paramount.

VMware has worked with Teradici to create a software-only version of the protocol. Desktop virtualization Chief Technology Officer Scott Davis goes into a lot of the details on his blog.

It's a User Datagram Protocol-based server-side protocol that transmits compressed bitmaps or frames to the remote client. This has the advantage of being able to make real-time adjustments to account for the available bandwidth and latency of the communications channel; the display quality degrades, if there isn't enough bandwidth but things still "work."

Although details differ, there are similarities to Sun's Appliance Link Protocol--which is well-regarded for its ability to deal with poor-quality connections. (A downside of server-side protocols is that they consume processing horsepower on the server, where it tends to be more expensive, rather than on the client.)

VMware will continue to support other remote display protocols, most notably Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. However, VMware is clearly positioning PCoIP as its favored technology and a point of competitive differentiation for VMware View in general.

Also in the graphics area, View 4 adds "multimonitor, adaptive display support--resolution optimization for each monitor, with an option to pivot and rotate the display output, supporting rich audio and video content with increased performance."

Other user experience enhancements generally relate to better integration with the overall desktop environment. For example, View Printing automatically discovers local printers without the need to install print drivers. View Limited Access provides a single point of authentication across VMware View environments, Windows Terminal Servers, Blade PCs, and remote physical PCs.

VMware View 4 comes in two editions. The Enterprise Edition includes the basics: VSphere 4 (the back-end server virtualization product), VCenter 4 (management), and View Manager 4 (for provisioning user access). It's priced at $150 per concurrent connection.

The $250-per-concurrent-user Premier Edition adds ThinApp 4 (for delivering ad hoc applications that aren't part of a master image) and View Composer (for managing images), both capabilities that would typically be desired in a large or sophisticated deployment.

VMware as a whole approaches the world from the perspective of the enterprise data center. Delivering desktops from that data center was somewhat of a sideshow. Is it now as focused on application delivery as, say, Citrix? Not really. But that said, desktop virtualization has moved beyond the sideshow stage at VMware.

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as highly subject to the whims of style or flights of fancy. The truth is closer to the notion that we're an evolving industry--one constantly struggling to find better ways.

It's not easy to grapple with the fantastic, relentless progress afforded by Moore's Law (on the supply side), nor the constant demand for more capacity, capability, and integration (on the demand side).

In a few short decades, IT has undergone a massive shift from an engineering-oriented support role to driving the beating heart of the global economy. IT is now central to large swaths of all human activity.

As new technologies and strategies come online--whether network computing, open source, agile development, service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, virtualization, or whatever--we seek to employ them to improve our outcomes.

There's always a bit of experimentation and a bit of hype involved in the early days. Indeed, without that willingness to "try it out" and a strong shot of enthusiasm on the side, we wouldn't be advancing as well as we are. That's not just hype you're hearing; it's also the will to progress. And for the most part, the recipe works.

Most of the major new approaches touted over the past few decades have become workaday parts of the IT landscape. Most apps, for example, are now "client-server" in design. Linux and other open-source engines run much of the Internet. SOA is how enterprise IT is designed.

The same Web services that Ellison derided years ago now underpin much of e-commerce, as well as high-interactivity Web 2.0 services such as Google Maps. And virtualization and orchestration--frequently discounted at the top of this decade--are now fundamentally changing how data centers are operated.

Indeed, when one of these previously experimental, previously hyped approaches recede from view, it's usually not because they've failed but because they've succeeded so well that we don't need to talk about them anymore. They've been burned into the way we do IT.

Each wave of technology builds on the last, incorporating its best parts, weeding out what didn't work, and often re-emphasizing themes that had appeared years before but weren't quite workable at that time--though often using different names. The utility computing, grid, and application service providers of years past, for example, have become the software as a service (SaaS, or more generally, ITaaS) and cloud computing of today.

So when something new comes your way--a new approach, a new strategy, a new way of looking at or doing IT--by all means, be skeptical. Try it out in careful, measured ways. But do try it out--and have enthusiasm for those new things. That's how we advance.

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announced Tuesday a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product.

The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, which is called V-Block. It will combine EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualized servers and networking equipment, and VMware's virtualization technology.

The deal had been rumored since September, when the Wall Street Journal reported the companies were working on a collaborative effort code-named Alpine. Talk of the deal heated up late last week and early this week.

The joint venture will market and provide maintenance for the product. But the cloud infrastructure will be built by all three companies.

Cisco and EMC already have a partnership to collaborate around Cisco's new data center platform, which the company calls Unified Computing. And EMC owns nearly 85 percent of VMware.

The companies will provide more details about the joint venture during a press call scheduled for 8:30 a.m. PT.

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware are expected to announce this week a new joint venture to sell data center products and services using virtualization technology, according to report in the Wall Street Journal.

The new products called "V-Block" combine EMC's storage equipment with Cisco's new virtualized services and networking equipment along with VMware's virtualization technology.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Cisco and EMC were in talks to form a new services venture code-named Alpine. V-Block may be this same service.

The products will either be sold as an end-to-end solution that companies can install in their own data centers, or customers will have the option of subscribing to a virtualized service, according to reports.

Cisco has been reselling EMC storage gear for years. It also owns a stake in virtualization software company VMware, which operates as a unit of EMC. So it makes sense that the companies would team up on a new services venture.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced a new data center architecture it calls Unified Computing, which includes new virtualized servers. It also includes coordinated support and software integration from partners such as Intel, Microsoft, EMC, and VMware.

Cisco sees the data center market as a multibillion-dollar opportunity. The company anticipates a greater need for storage and high-speed networking within data centers as more services and content come online. Cisco's corporate customers have also begun to virtualize their data centers to make those operations more efficient.

The joint venture will have its own CEO, according to the Journal.

Representatives from Cisco, EMC, and VMware have declined to comment.

The new joint venture is expected to be announced Wednesday before Cisco releases its fiscal first-quarter results.

Gartner analyst David Cearley

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

ORLANDO, Fla.--Cloud computing isn't going to be vapor much longer, Gartner said Tuesday.

The general idea--shared computing services accessible over the Internet that can expand or contract on demand--topped Gartner's list of the 10 top technologies that information technology personnel need to plan for. It's complicated, poses security risks, and computing technology companies are latching onto the buzzword in droves, but the phenomenon should be taken seriously, said analyst Dave Cearley here at the Gartner Symposium.

Gartner's top trends to watch.

(Credit: Gartner)

Specifically, companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company's firewall.

Cloud computing takes several forms, from the nuts and bolts of Amazon Web Services to the more finished foundation of Google App Engine to the full-on application of Salesforce.com. Companies should figure out what if any of those approaches are most suited to their challenges, Gartner said.

Gartner analyst Carl Claunch

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The advice came as part of a talk on top trends coming in 2010 that companies should incorporate into their strategic planning, if not necessarily their own computer systems. The full list of 10: 1. cloud computing; 2. advanced analytics; 3. client computing; 4. IT for green; 5. reshaping the data center; 6. social computing; 7. security--activity monitoring; 8. flash memory; 9. virtualization for availability; and 10. mobile applications.

Second on the list is virtualization--not just in the broad sense of technology that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, where it's become a fixture in data centers, but as a means to keep computing services up and running despite computer failures, said analyst Carl Claunch.

Virtual machines can be moved from one physical machine to another today. Later, by keeping two machines tightly synchronized, a failure in a primary machine can be eased over rapidly by moving the active service to the backup machine, Claunch said.

"We should start seeing this roll out in the next year or two from vendors," he said.

The Gartner hype cycle takes on the PC.

(Credit: Gartner)

For PCs, virtualization is arriving, too.

"Think of applications in bubbles," Cearley said. "They can run on client devices or up on a server," with virtualization providing the encapsulation technology to move the work around. The official corporate computing environment can run side by side with employees' home computing environment.

That, along with cloud computing, enables more freedom for people using PCs.

"We're looking at a time when the specific operating system and device options matter a lot less," Cearley said. "You could use a home PC or a Macintosh with a managed corporate image running on that particular device...We see more companies providing a stipend (for) employee-owned PCs."

Make your data center modular.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Another idea: modular data centers. You don't have set up your IT gear in storage containers, but do divide them into pods that each have their own computing, power, and cooling, Claunch said. That makes it easier to pay as you go, to adapt to new technologies, and to increase energy efficiency by partitioning hot hardware from cooler hardware.

Green IT is important--and changing in its nature. It's not just a matter of buying efficient computers, but also of using computers to increase the efficiency of other parts of the business, Cearley said. For example, analytics can improve the efficiency of transportation of goods.

Next comes applications for mobile devices. "That has great potential for creating different experience or stickiness for your customers," Cearley said.

And mobile x86 processors from Intel and AMD could make software development easier, too, he added.

Social networking will happen internally and externally.

(Credit: Gartner)

Social-networking applications, broadly defined, also should be on company radar screens. The technology can take the form of internal corporate social networks, interactions with customers, and use of public services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Companies need to get a handle on what's going on--and potentially business purposes such as understanding how the corporate brand is perceived.

"Social network analysis will be moving from a somewhat arcane discipline to a much more mainstream component of your social computing strategy," Cearley said.

Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

IT spending may be tight, but chief information officers plan to increase their budget allocation to a select group of virtualization vendors, including VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat, according to a Goldman Sachs CIO survey released Monday.

It's not surprising that virtualization is top of mind and wallet for CIOs, but things look particularly rosy for Red Hat, given its position as the market leader in open source and a strong challenger in virtualization.

While the percentage of CIOs expecting to increase IT spending has grown since Goldman Sachs' last survey in June 2009, a full 69 percent expect to maintain or decrease their IT spending.

Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs sees Red Hat boosting its share of IT spending as the open-source leader claims the lion's share of a Unix-to-Linux server shift that "remain(s) in the early innings." Equally important, Red Hat is seen as a critical integration and distribution point for other vendors:

Red Hat is positioned well for the emerging cloud-computing ecosystem, given its open-source background and current positioning in data centers, including enterprises as well as cloud providers such as Amazon. In addition, Red Hat's strategic importance to others is also increased by its platform capabilities that provide a beachhead for many other software products into the corporate data center. That being said, cloud computing remains a nascent opportunity with little revenue contribution to date and an increasing competitive landscape.

To date, Red Hat has mostly resisted the temptation to expand its product portfolio beyond the operating system, and directly adjacent opportunities like virtualization and cloud computing. However, as the company further strengthens its balance sheet and grows in confidence, we should finally see Red Hat use its dominant brand to give CIOs more reasons to pay Red Hat money.

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

Intriguingly, Red Hat may be pushed to this step by the increasingly ambitious VMware, which has far more cash and a strong interest in being the foundation for enterprise's cloud-computing technology. According to the Goldman Sachs report:

VMware is a leader in three important growth themes in IT: server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. We also believe that as virtualization penetration increases, the company has an opportunity to take significant share of the large systems management software market. Microsoft's increasing focus on the space is a risk; however, our latest checks give us greater confidence in VMware's customer loyalty and the company's significant technology lead. We also see room for significant ongoing margin expansion as the company matures.

With the recent acquisition of open-source vendor SpringSource, VMware can deliver on the powerful "Build-Deploy-Manage" mantra that SpringSource championed to its 2 million developers.

Both companies should thrive as IT budgets remain lean. But which will ultimately benefit most is a question of execution and ambition.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

SAN FRANCISCO--If the average person has heard of virtualization at all, the idea probably left little impression beyond something to do with running corporate data centers packed with computing hardware.

But the era in which virtualization directly affects ordinary folks, too, is on its way.

The company in the forefront of the technology, an EMC subsidiary called VMware, drew 12,488 people to its VMworld conference here this week, and one theme of the show was the growing push to move the technology beyond the server realm. Initially that means PCs, but the company demonstrated its technology on mobile phones, too.

What is virtualization? Simply put, it lets a single computer run multiple operating systems at the same time in compartments called virtual machines. Each instance of an operating system runs on a virtualization layer rather than on the actual computer hardware. The company in charge of that foundational layer has tremendous power in the computing industry.

VMware CTO Stephen Herrod

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

VMware has competition from Citrix, Red Hat, Microsoft, and others, but for now its head start, corporate alliances, and solid technology give it a lead in the market. Most of VMware's business comes from virtualizing servers, which lets companies replace a host of largely idle machines with one that's running full tilt, but the company is working to expand into many new markets.

Employee-owned IT
Before it met its present success in the server market, VMware got its start on PCs. Virtualization proved useful, for example, for developers who wanted to switch rapidly among different versions of an operating system to test their software or different versions of a browser to test their Web pages. VMware also can help people run Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X on the same machine--but again, that's not a mainstream need.

But as VMware sees it--and I think there's some merit to this belief--virtualization could become more widely used as a way to smooth the differences between people's own computer preferences and their employers' needs.

In the "employee-owned IT" vision, virtualization could let people put a corporate-managed virtual machine on an personal computer. The corporate partition would run only company-approved applications and could connect to the company network; the personal half could run the chaos of other programs that cause corporate IT folks to grind their teeth.

VMware has a technology--formerly called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and now sporting the more palatable name of VMware View--that also could fit into this idea. With it, the brains of a PC actually run on a central server, with a person's local machine serving as a mechanism to show the display and capture mouse clicks and keystrokes. So an employee's corporate PC could actually be housed at the corporate and piped over the Net to wherever the employee happens to be.

VMware's View demonstration featured graphics acceleration using Microsoft's DirectX 3D graphics and full-motion video--albeit a with some jerkiness. Hardware support in newer Intel and AMD processors also speeds virtualization performance.

VMware View is latest twist on a technology called thin client computing. That approach has found a solid niche in some large businesses but that never has caught on widely. In my opinion, though, the greater challenge comes from an entirely different way of attaining the same centralized goals: cloud computing.

Cloud computing, in which applications run over the Web in Web browsers rather than natively on PCs, provides another way to provide access to corporate resources. It can't do everything, but it's gradually maturing as a way to run software. And it has the advantage of requiring only a modern browser rather than VMware's software.

VMware showed Google's Android system running on a Windows CE mobile phone through VMware virtualization software.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Virtual phones
At VMworld, Chief Technology Officer Stephen Herrod and Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of emerging markets, also demonstrated virtualization on a mobile phone. Specifically, they showed a mobile phone using Windows CE 6.0 run Google's Android operating system, too.

"Why not virtualize the phone itself?" Herrod asked. "It's really becoming more of a mobile personal computer."

Why bother? VMware has two arguments.

Wyse Pocket Cloud and VMware View means people can get to their PC desktops with an iPhone.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First is a mobile-phone version of the employee-owned IT vision, where a mobile phone could run corporate programs and access corporate resources in one mode and be used for personal tasks in the other. VMware touts two basic approaches--one in which the second operating system runs at the same time and one in which the phone could switch between the two modes.

The second is programming. Coders face a minefield of complexity when it comes to writing software that can work on many phones. Visa, which demonstrated a mobile application for checking credit card transactions running with VMware's mobile virtualization technology, expressed support for VMware's help in this domain.

The variety of "handset manufacturers, infrastructure, and telco restrictions...makes the mobile space--while exciting--very daunting," said Peter Ciurea, Visa's global head of product development. "Anything that opens the possibility of easy portability we're very excited about."

But here, too, VMware's ideas face complications. Offering a simplified foundation to programmers doesn't mean complexity vanishes--it just means VMware has to shoulder the burden through its software. And virtualization takes computing horsepower.

Of course, hardware steadily improves. Krishnamurti's demonstration used a phone with 256MB of memory, but he said in an interview VMware's technology works with 128MB, too.

VMware also showed Wyse Pocket Cloud software running on an iPhone in conjunction with VMware View to give a view of a Windows PC desktop--though the demonstration showed nothing more than panning around the desktop view.

More expansion
So VMware won't have a simple time conquering clients, though it has a credible shot at it. Fortunately for the company, it's also got many other irons in the fire.

Many of these are closer to VMware's core server virtualization business. The company is gradually expanding from its initial phase of adoption, in which virtualization was used to increase server efficiency, to a more elaborate idea in which the technology leads to a more flexible data center.

For example, virtual machines can be moved off busy servers to idle ones during peak ours of activity, then they can be moved back and the idle ones can be shut down when demand slackens. Increasingly, that sort of optimization is an automated process governed by policies set up in advance.

Srinivas Krishnamurti, VMware's director of emerging markets

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

VMware also is trying to stake a claim on another facet of cloud computing, in which companies can shift workload from their own data center's virtualization foundation to one housed at a remote data center operated by a third party. At VMworld, the company announced that AT&T, Savvis, Terremark, and Verizon Business all are offering that cloud service. VMware also said it's trying to standardize its cloud-foundation interfaces through a standards group called the Distributed Management Task Force.

All of this means VMware is competing more than ever with Microsoft. That's not just because Microsoft offers virtualization software, but because Microsoft is accustomed to being one of the primary software foundations of the computing industry.

VMware is usurping Microsoft's position with many of its products. It has relationships with those who make computer hardware for computers, storage, and networking, and it's building ever-stronger relationships with corporate IT administration staff. Windows and management tools for it hardly are being relegated to the sidelines, but VMware's approach can make them more peripheral.

The company has plenty of work to make its full vision a reality. But it's working from a position of some strength.