VMware hit the road on Friday along with Dell, Altiris and Intel for a series of panel discussions and technology demonstrations in Australia and New Zealand, with interoperability being a key theme. The roadshow will run over the next month.

There has been a lot of activity in the virtualization space recently with Microsoft giving away Virtual Server 2005 Release 2, and announcing that it will provide support under current Virtual Server contracts for Linux guest operating systems. It will also build native virtualization support into Longhorn.

Red Hat is building support for Xen 3.0 into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; SuSE Linux 10.0 comes with a technological preview of Xen 3; and XenSource is reading a packaged version of its virtualization technology called XenEnterprise.

AMD and Intel are building virtualization support into processors. Hardware-assisted virtualization, Intel says, will improve performance by making the hardware handle handoffs between the virtualization layer and guest operating systems, and eliminate control conflicts by providing a "higher privilege ring for the virtual machine monitor", among other benefits. Intel Xeon-based systems with the new capabilities are expected to ship in the first half of this year and Itanium 2 in the second half.

Dell CTO Kevin Kettler said recently that virtualization plays an important role in his company's scalable enterprise vision. He sees customers moving to environments built on one, two and four socket systems (because sockets can be multicore). Customers will be able to pay as they grow instead of investing in monolithic systems.