Dave Chacon, manager of information systems technology services for PING, the golf club and equipment maker, says vendors should think of virtualization as a fundamental piece of the operating system—"not just an add-on"—as IBM did with mainframes.

And he sees an opening for Microsoft, since Windows dominates the operating system market. That, combined with pricing, led Chacon to Virtual Server.

In 2004, PING looked for a low-cost way to virtualize its Windows environments. Already a Windows shop, the equipment maker went with Microsoft. Chacon looked at VMware but says the software cost at least 10 times more.

He also considered blade servers—thinner boxes that take up less rack space than x86 servers—but adding hardware costs was a deal-breaker. To install and deploy more physical servers, Chacon says he would have had to fly in consultants, build a test environment and then make a decision based on the results.

Going with virtualization avoided thousands of dollars in consulting fees in the planning stages alone. Still, Chacon wishes Virtual Server were built in to the operating system. If it were, managing virtual machines and the operating system would be one and the same. Instead, he has to manage them separately. Ni says Longhorn will move virtualization closer to being embedded in Windows.

Still, Chacon believes managing virtual machines—whether one or 100—should be an out-of-the-box attribute of any platform. "There's still a whole level of maturity [of products] that needs to happen in the marketplace in general," he says.

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