Look, quite frankly a lot of the posters are missing the point entirely here. VMware's strength is in large to huge enterprise-class solutions. Where is Xen's equivalent to VMotion (being able to move a running VM from one physical ESX server to another)? It is at the full-blown implementations with VirtualCenter controlling a bunch of ESX servers that VMware really shines - everything else is just a trickle-down effect to the desktop. It's nice stuff and is intended suck you in to the larger and larger implementations. Take a look at VMware Lab Manager's features sometime (basically a pre-packed VirtualCenter with ESX host and some other nice test lab-specific features) and tell me if you don't start drooling (if you need to run a lab environment with a lot of different test servers, that is). justwally hit the nail on the head when he said the article should be titled “Can VMware end CORPORATE Linux hardware compatibility problems?”. Let's face it, you'll never run HPC clusters or DB servers on VMware, nor would you want to run your gaming machine on it (at least not until we all have 16-core CPUs with 1TB RAM... ;] ) - that would be entirely missing the point. VMware is there to help you create isolated functional silos that have their own library version requirements, etc., without having to deal with the nightmare of trying to install multiple incompatible SW packages (just to clarify: that is more of an issue with Windows servers and DLL hell rather then Linux machines, of course... ;] ). Each of these machines can be completely underutilized but you gain gigantic benefits of snapshotting the VM image before a SW upgrade to give you an instant way back in case the upgrade bombs (a huge corporate requirement) and having separate environments. Believe me, in a corporate environment with literally tens of thousands of servers, VMware is every admin's wet dream. For the end user I find that it's nice to be able to run Windows inside my Linux desktop in case I really need to run some Windows apps. It's easy right now for me to use VMware since that's what use in a corporate environment as well. However, having an open source image format is a very smart move on VMware's part, since it will increase support, get the OS community involved and create an even bigger ground swell of support. Now, granted, as mentioned in the article, if we can get to the point where the hypervisor (the piece of SW that emulates the HW and runs the VM) is embedded in a chip or has so little overhead that it's effectively unnoticeable, yeah, sure, I'm going to run a VMware install as my base OS as well to avoid all the other hassles of moving machines, etc. Wouldn't it be nice every time you do an upgrade to be able to just move the VM image and you're done!? No lengthy reinstallations, reconfiguring all your SW, etc. Again, a properly installed Linux distro with all my customizations in a /home partition should make this a lot easier than Windows, but for a Windows install this would be great. Even Linux installs would benefit though, since instead of a couple of hours to set up, it would now take me a couple of minutes to get an identically-configured machine up and running. Shoot, I could even keep the old one up and running while I test the new one and make sure everything's working fine. »