Content Management Matters ™

With all this talk about virtualization darling VMware (its record quarter, its fawning suitors), we'd nearly forgotten there were other pretenders to the throne.

Said pretenders include Microsoft, which just began public trials of Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is the official name of Microsoft's long-awaited "Viridian" hypervisor, whose release has already been delayed a couple of times -- bumped from Q1 2007, to Q3, to nowheresville.

But according to Fortune, Hyper-V's software will appear in three editions (there will be eight) of Windows Server 2008, with the first public release slated for Q1 2008.

Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter will include Hyper-V by default.

With word that it's getting dubbed "the new Google" by Stateside investors, VMware's share cost on the NYSE have leaped from a forecast of US$ 23 to about US$ 27, per yesterday's numbers.

There's nothing like buying your way into an industry to get a foot through the door.

Intel Capital just made a US$ 218.5 million buy-in on virtualization company VMware, pocketing 9.5 million Class A shares (that's US$ 23 per share) in the process.

Word on the street is virtual infrastructure purveyor VMware is preparing a reduced-footprint version of its existing ESX hypervisor, dubbed ESX Lite. The slimmed-down solution is set up to run directly within a server's firmware -- a notion that, while talked about, is virtually unheard-of in practice.

If you thought virtualization couldn't get any sexier, your mind is about to be blown. Last Thursday Parallels 3.0 was announced for the Mac, and the 3D gaming support it has going on is crazy-gorgeous.

Time can be a severe dictator. To keep on-schedule for a promised virtualization technology release, Microsoft announced Thursday that it plans to pull features out of its "Viridian" hypervisor to keep on schedule.

This news comes after a previous delay in which the launch date for the beta, scheduled for the first half of 2007, was moved to the second half.