Dave Northey: I was reading this article about the up-and-coming ESX Server 3i from VMware.

It calls out a bunch on "new features" that we have either been doing for ages, or have announced that we will have in Windows Server Virtualisation (WSV), when we ship Windows Server 2008 - I'm confused (seems like someone is trying to introduce a load of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

They call out 64GB virtual machines and 128GB physical machines. We'll do 64GB virtual machines with WSV and 64-bit Windows will work with systems with up to 1 Terabyte of physical memory. The reason for this, if you're interested is that our hypervisor is 64-bit and ESX is still 32-bit.

They call out support for virtualisation-aware (para-virtualised) Linux operating systems. We are working with both Novell and XenSource, so we'll do that too (we already support both RedHat and SUSE Linux on Virtual Server).

There's more, but the 'funniest' is the reference to expanded hardware support (storage and networking). Both Virtual Server and WSV use native Windows device drivers - have a look at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com, you'll see that we already support over 6,500 storage items. Both our server virtualisation offerings (Virtual Server and WSV) are completely hardware independent - as long as there is a Windows device driver, you're OK. VMware has a very small, limited sub-set of hardware that they can run on.