How about this? The Portable Consultant actually addressing an interesting development or two in the world of Infrastructure Architecture ~ Design & Deployment!

virtual competitors
Item One is the IPO of VMware which, The Economist assures us, is not a repeat of the Internet Bubble years despite the fact that the stock rose 76% on the first day.

Item Two is the acquisition of privately held XenSource by Citrix which is seen by The Motley Fool as a reasonable response to the changing technology that threatens their main product line.

virtual uses in the data centre and at home
As a technical architect I had been waiting for some time for VMware and similar virtualization options to catch on for server virtualization. Amongst my customers this has been happening during the past couple of years. As a parent I have been using VMware Workstation for several years now as a way to isolate my child from upsetting my fragile Windows configuration on the family PC.

the future of XenSource
It is interesting that a company based on proprietary software, Citrix, has looked to a company based on open source, XenSource, to save its bacon. This further validates the open source business model. It will be interesting to see how Citrix now deals with its new open source property and the open source based businesses and communities that have been instrumental in the success of XenSource including Novell and Red Hat.

Cheers,
-pmh