During VMware CEO Diane Greene's opening VMworld keynote, four hardware manufacturers announced they will soon ship servers with a hypervisor pre-installed, allowing customers to activate virtual machines shortly after turning on the server.

Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and NEC all said they are committed to producing servers with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor pre-installed.

Mark Jarvis, former Oracle chief marketer and Dell's chief marketing officer since April, joined Greene on stage Tuesday morning in San Francisco to illustrate how virtualization can be embedded in a server. The simplest way is to add a flash memory device to the motherboard of the server. The device holds a stripped down, 32-megabyte version of ESX Server called ESX Server 3i, announced Monday.

Jarvis and Greene turned on a new AMD quad-core Barcelona chip server from Dell, showing ESX 3i loading automatically. Using the VMware Infrastructure 3 client screen that was displayed, Greene clicked on an image of a virtual machine stored on a nearby networked disk array and activated it.

"We think this is a really big deal, up and running with virtualization in two minutes," said Jarvis.

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said in a recorded video that Dell plans to ship virtualized servers by the end of November. "Virtualization really does simplify IT," he said.

VMware's and the hardware manufacturer's view that virtualization can be made a feature of the hardware is at variance with Microsoft's plans to offer virtualization as a feature of the operating system. Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2008 is due next February, with the Viridian hypervisor to be added within six months.

IBM senior VP Bill Zeitler said in a recorded video that IBM will ship its xSeries x3950 in the fourth quarter with quad-core, Intel processors running VMware's embedded hypervisor. HP's senior VP James Mouton, Fujitsu Siemens Computers' chief marketing officer Barbara Schadler, and NEC senior VP Yohikazu Maruyama all appeared in recorded videos citing their plans to ship x86 servers with ESX 3i embedded in them.

The shift by the hardware makers to embed virtualization illustrates how far virtualization of the data center has come in a year's time. At VMware's annual user group meeting last year in Los Angeles, spokesmen on stage debated when virtualization would cease to be a specialized niche and enter the mainstream. That debate appears to be over with virtualization's adoption by the hardware manufacturers. You can dynamically scale your infrastructure with embedded hypervisors and "drag and drop virtual machines off of network attached storage," noted Greene.

Greene spent several minutes trying to dispel the notion that an embedded hypervisor or any other hypervisor will one day replace the operating system on customer's servers.

"The operating system does far more than any hypervisor," managing the end user's interactions through the user interface with the server's applications. A hypervisor, on the other hand, sits between a virtual machine's operating system and the processors, routing communications between the operating system, the CPUs, and other system resources. It also enforces limits on how many resources any one virtual machine consumes.

"The hypervisor just manages the [physical machine] resources," such as CPU cycles, random access memory, and disk storage for the virtual machines running above it, said Greene.

The supporting virtual machine software, such as Virtual Infrastructure 3, "aggregates those resources" into a logical system that can be run through a single management interface.

On a cluster or gird, Virtual Infrastructure 3 can manage a single server failure by shifting workloads and activating more virtual machines. It can activate disaster recovery if necessary, firing up stored images of failed systems, something that many VMware customers are starting to do in addition to consolidate servers in the data center, she said.

Greene addressed another area of growing concern among virtualization users, the incompatibility of virtual machine file formats. Files configured to run in Microsoft's Virtual Server don't run under ESX Server, and vice versa. XenSource has made its file format compatible with Microsoft's VHD but not VMware's VMDK. Now Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource have cooperated on specification to set a cross-platform standard for such virtual files, which will serve as a basis for erasing barriers that exist between virtual machine operating environments.

They have produced a specification for how virtual machines run and have agreed on a neutral virtual machine file format called Open Virtualization Format. OVF has been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force as a future standard, Greene said in her opening keynote. IBM, HP, Intel, AMD, and other hardware vendors have prompted the virtualization vendors to unite behind one format, noted Rich Lechler, IBM's VP of IT optimization.

VMware officials said there were 10,000 people attending VMworld in San Francisco this year, although figures for paid attendance haven't been announced yet. There are 107 exhibitors at the show at the Moscone Center. It's the fourth VMworld, with about 7,000 attending last year's event and 1,500 attending the first VMworld held in L.A. in 2004.