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The battle for the virtual data centre has begun and Microsoft is making its presence felt by snatching market share from its arch-rival VMware with some recent customer deployments of its Hyper-V virtualisation hypervisor, but VMware continues to defend its turf amid the onslaught of new competition.

IBM plans to acquire virtualization vendor Transitive Corporation, whose software lets applications run on multiple platforms even if they were designed for a single type of microprocessor and operating system.

Microsoft may have been late to the server virtualisation party, but it’s Hyper-V beginning to see success up against the more established VMware and Xen hypervisors.

VMware officials objected to an assertion by IDC that VMware has lost some of its industry-leading market share to Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft's new Hyper-V product has barely made a dent in sales.

A two-horse race. That's how the market for general purpose desktop virtualization packages is shaping up, at least for the foreseeable future. With Microsoft all but abandoning Virtual PC, and with everyone else focusing on the datacenter, the field now consists of just VMware Workstation and Sun Microsystems' xVM VirtualBox.

Hewlett-Packard has announced a broad sweep of new virtualization products along with survey results claiming that most businesses aren't making the most of what the technology has to offer.

As Microsoft officially released its Application Virtualization 4.5 software this week, it also announced several licensing changes around virtual desktops and application virtualization, while omitting a long-anticipated one.

Citrix Monday unveiled the newest version of its flagship product, which underwent a recent name change as Citrix tries to align its traditional application delivery tools with its new desktop and server virtualization technology.

Many VMware customers Tuesday were prevented from logging onto their virtual servers as a bug distributed in a software update effectively stopped the boxes from powering up.

Microsoft will ship its virtual machine management tool in September, according to Kevin Turner, the company's chief operating officer.

VMware Tuesday said it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market.

Hoping to stay a step ahead of rival VMware, Citrix Systems is now shipping its XenDesktop product line of desktop virtualization software.

VMware is holding onto its market-share lead in the x86 virtualization market but Microsoft is making a strong push with Hyper-V, IDC statistics show.

VMware Wednesday released the second beta of its virtualization software, Fusion 2.0, adding features such as multiple backups, mirrored folders and support for Mac OS X Server 10.5.

Microsoft is targeting system management as a way to differentiate itself from competitors in the virtualization market, the company said Tuesday.

Virtualization is causing customers to rethink their backup strategies, with technology that combines pieces of traditional and well-understood enterprise backup with some pieces that are unique in the virtualized world.

Blade Network Technologies, the data-center server-switch company spun off from Nortel two years ago, this week unveiled a line of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for rack-level network virtualization.

It's been said that a server virtualization project is actually an infrastructure redesign project, and certainly in areas related to storage and data protection, the impact can be dramatic both in terms of the volume of data and in the operations to support and protect it. Backup is a particular case in point.