VMware's goal Tuesday was to convince customers that virtualization, widely used for server consolidation and to set up test and development environments, is now reliable and scalable enough to run large databases and other critical applications.

The message was hammered home by a lineup of industry bigwigs that included Michael Dell, Cisco's John Chambers, Intel senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger, and Joe Tucci, chairman of EMC, which owns a stake in VMware.

"We can see from the demonstrations and the testimonials today that there are no applications -- no applications -- that can't be run in a virtualized environment," Tucci said.